Former First Deputy AG: Kane’s Reaction to Grand Jury Leak ‘Very Troubling’

The third day of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s trial on perjury and conspiracy charges revealed discrepancies between Kane’s claims and those of Bruce Beemer, the first deputy attorney general in 2014.

Beemer said in his testimony at Norristown’s Montgomery County Court on Wednesday that he was “shocked” when he first read a Philadelphia Daily News article that lies at the center of the trial. The article reportedly contained secret grand jury material leaked from Kane’s office, and Kane is now accused of illegally leaking that material to the Daily News herself.

According to the Inquirer, Beemer asked Kane if he could investigate the leak after reading the article in 2014 and was surprised, he said, to hear Kane say it was unnecessary of him and that the leak was “not a big deal.”

Beemer said that at the time he suspected the leaked information had come from employees in the AG’s Norristown office, the Inquirer reports, and that he found Kane’s reaction to be “very troubling.”

Beemer claimed that after he discovered a judge had instead appointed a special prosecutor to figure out how the information was leaked, Kane asked him to file a motion questioning the authority of the prosecutor.

Kane’s lawyers fired questions at Beemer after he testified, however, claiming his timeline was off — a special prosector was appointed to review the leak before the Daily News article ran, for example, the Inquirer reports. But Beemer said he and other office members were unaware of the investigation for weeks.

According to the Inquirer, Beemer said that at one point Kane asked him, “Bruce, if I were taken out of here in handcuffs, what do you think my last act would be?”

Kane’s trial started Monday.

Follow @ClaireSasko on Twitter.