Kathleen Kane Convicted of Perjury, Obstruction of Justice

The embattled state attorney general has been found guilty of abusing her office to retaliate against a former prosecutor.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane was convicted Monday night on two counts of perjury and seven other counts, including obstruction of justice and abuse of office, according to multiple reports.

A jury found Kane responsible for the leakling of secret grand jury documents to the Daily News as an act of political retaliation against former prosecutor Frank Fina. Kane suspected that Fina had been responsible for a March 2014 report in the Inquirer that she had scuttled an investigation of six Philadelphia Democrats who’d been caught accepting bribes in a sting operation. The grand jury documents suggested that Fina had dropped an earlier investigation into Jerry Mondesire, the former head of the Philadelphia NAACP.

Fina was later hired by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and helped successfully prosecute five of the six Democrats who’d been caught in the original sting. Fina was then ensnared in a scandal involving pornographic emails sent back and forth between state employees. He left the District Attorney’s office in June.

Kane’s descent began when the Inquirer published its story about the spiked investigation just over a year after she took office. The first woman and first Democrat elected as attorney general of Pennsylvania, Kane was stripped of her law license last fall and announced in February that she wouldn’t seek a second term. She maintains her innocence, and her attorneys say they’ll appeal the decision. By law, she must resign if and when she is sentenced, according to Billy Penn.

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