Report: Abandoned Sting Started With Diverse Targets

AG said she didn't prosecute because operation snared mostly black politicos.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has said she abandoned the sting operation that caught Philly Democrats taking cash on tape, in part, because the investigation settled on an almost exclusively African-American traget list, giving the project an appearance of “racial profiling” that would be fatal if the case made it to a jury.

But a new report suggests the scope of the investigation was initially much broader. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that confidential informant Tyron Ali “dealt with 25 black officials, 23 Caucasians and three Latinos, said the sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. Of the 51 people with whom Ali dealt, there were 27 House members, five senators, 11 lobbyists and eight Philadelphia city officials. The group included 39 Democrats, seven Republicans and five for whom party affiliation was not available.”

We’d love to know who those city officials were.

In any case, Kane stands by her reasoning, the paper reports. The evidence left behind had a different demographic makeup: “The attorney general said of 113 recording sessions, 108 recordings, or 95.5 percent, were black ‘targets.’ “