Pennsylvania Attorney General Kane Threatens to Sue People If They Continue Accurately Reporting That She Dropped Prosecutions of Democrats Caught Taking Bribes

First of all, the background:

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office ran an undercover sting operation over three years that captured leading Philadelphia Democrats, including four members of the city's state House delegation, on tape accepting money, The Inquirer has learned.

Yet no one was charged with a crime.

Prosecutors began the sting in 2010 when Republican Tom Corbett was attorney general. After Democrat Kathleen G. Kane took office in 2013, she shut it down.

In a statement to The Inquirer on Friday, Kane called the investigation poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism, saying it had targeted African Americans.

...

Before Kane ended the investigation, sources familiar with the inquiry said, prosecutors amassed 400 hours of audio and videotape that documented at least four city Democrats taking payments in cash or money orders, and in one case a $2,000 Tiffany bracelet.

Typically, the payments made at any one time were relatively modest - ranging from $500 to $2,000 - but most of those involved accepted multiple payments, people familiar with the investigation said. In some cases, the payments were offered in exchange for votes or contracts, they said.

Sources with knowledge of the sting said the investigation made financial pitches to both Republicans and Democrats, but only Democrats accepted the payments.

...

Sources with knowledge of the sting said Ali approached a wide range of officials, from both parties, black and white. In time, the sources said, Ali didn't even have to reach out to elected officials. They called him.

Tyron B. Ali was a lobbyist who'd been caught in a $430,000 fraud case. Apparently prosecutors recruited him to wear a wire for this investigation. He was connected to the political culture of west Philadelphia, because that's where he'd operated before. That, rather than race, accounts for who he did or didn't contact. (And, apparently, elected officials were calling him, anyway.)

Given this explosive slam-dunk corruption case, Kane chooses to disappear it, and issues a single quote when asked about it: that the case is "nothing more than the Good Ol' Boys club playing political games to discredit me in order to fulfill their own selfish and improper agenda."

And now, via the Ungrateful Loaf of Bread, she seems to be threatening the free press in an effort to cover up her cover up.

During the meeting, Sprague [Kane's new lawyer] suggested that The Inquirer may have been used by the sources of its stories – “wittingly or unwittingly” as a “weapon” to attack Kane to defend themselves from potential charges of wrongdoing in the management of the probe.

“I intend to look at the investigation from the very beginning to the conclusion of it, and in terms of what has been published, by this paper and others, to take appropriate action on behalf of the attorney general against those responsible for the defamatory and the false publications that have been made,” Sprague said.

Incredible. Incredible.

posted by Ace at 11:16 AM

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