The Kane soap opera continues
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane will turn 50 next week, which is a landmark that naturally sparks some reflection. She has plenty to reflect upon, given the chaos that swirled around her during most of her tenure as the commonwealth’s top law-enforcement officer, and she will soon have plenty of time to engage in reflection, since she declined to mount what inevitably would have been a losing campaign for a second term.
There’s a trial that awaits in August on charges she leaked material from a grand-jury investigation to a newspaper, which guarantees to keep Kane in the headlines. But just when it would have been opportune for Kane to slip into a lame-duck twilight, she has spent the last couple of weeks in the news for more stumbles and snafus, reminding even once staunch supporters how glad they will be when Kane becomes a private citizen.
First, there was a much ballyhooed news conference planned for May 31 that would have offered details on the “porngate” email scandal that ended the careers of two state Supreme Court justices and ensnared other officials. However, on Memorial Day, the plug was pulled on the news conference after Bruce Castor, the commonwealth’s solicitor general, said the report that was prepared by special prosecutor Douglas Gensler, a former attorney general in Maryland, was “not comprehensive.”
In a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Castor explained, “I’d rather hear whether the law was being properly enforced rather than whether a bunch of adolescent emails were being sent around.”
Around the same time, Kane’s office lost spokesman Chuck Ardo, a veteran public relations operative who previously served Gov. Ed Rendell and Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson. Ardo lasted in the post for 13 months, which made him the longest-serving of all Kane’s press secretaries. Since taking office in January 2013, Kane burned through seven of them, meaning the average tenure of her press secretaries is about six months.
Ardo offered some hints about why so many of Kane’s mouthpieces sprinted to the exits. Before Ardo resigned, Kane reportedly berated him over the phone within earshot of a reporter for the transgression of … leading that reporter on a tour of the attorney general’s office in Harrisburg.
“I could no longer in good conscience do the job she had hired me to do,” Ardo told a reporter for the website PennLive. “I’m not particularly religious and there are lots of people who would wonder about my ethics, but I try to be honest and I try to be transparent. It’s difficult to do this job with those values.”
He also said, “The problem is not what she did or didn’t tell me to do. The problem was that I had to explain her actions, and that became increasingly difficult for me.”
And then there’s this: It was reported by Allentown’s Morning Call this week the Office of Attorney General is being sued by none other than Kane’s twin sister, Ellen Granahan, a chief deputy attorney general who oversees the child predator unit. Granahan claims her $88,000 annual salary is less than what other lawyers within the office earn.
If this were a soap opera, viewers would thrill to the twists and turns and await the Friday cliffhanger.
But it’s a state agency that deserves competent management. We should all be counting the days until the curtain comes down on this saga.