Her tragic fall is now complete: Attorney Kathleen Kane, who served as Pennsylvania’s top prosecutor before she was jailed as a convicted criminal, now has been barred from the practice of law.
The disciplinary board of the state Supreme Court disbarred her March 22, after having suspended her law license in 2015. Kane, 52, got the news of her disbarment as she sat behind bars at the Montgomery County jail.
She is serving a 10-month to 23-month term for perjury and obstruction after having been convicted in 2016 of leaking secret grand jury information to a newspaper then lying about it. She resigned from her job as the Pennsylvania attorney general. She ran out the clock on appeals, finally succumbing to the inevitable jail sentence in November.
Kane’s story is a modern-day morality tale and a one-woman show.
A brilliant lawyer with an aptitude for politics, it looked for a time that the sky would be the limit. She had risen from relative obscurity to a high-profile state office — a perch from which even bigger careers are launched. The first female AG in Pennsylvania, Kane won the post in a 2012 landslide. She took office in January 2013. During her brief tenure as AG, she unveiled a pay-to-play scandal at the Pennsylvania Turnpike, bringing down a turnpike CEO and a former state senator. She was the catalyst of an investigation into emailed pornography that brought down two state Supreme Court justices.
But, she proved to be her own undoing, undone by her own drive for revenge.
Kane had orchestrated an illegal news leak to damage a political enemy as retribution for a perceived public slight against her. She had blamed the enemy, prosecutor Frank Fina, for a March 2014 newspaper article that revealed she had quietly shut down a sting operation that had targeted elected Democratic officials from Philadelphia. In retaliation, Kane arranged her own leak. She whispered to a newspaper secret grand jury information related to a separate investigation. She had hoped the information would cast Mr. Fina in a bad light for his handling of a separate corruption case. Nothing stays secret forever. Kane’s scheme was disclosed.
There should be no chops-licking over Kane’s tragic fall, just a lesson to be learned: Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
First Published: March 28, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
