Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane will be charged with leaking confidential documents and then lying about it under oath, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. After nearly six months of review and fresh investigation, Montgomery County, Pa., District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman has endorsed a grand jury’s recommendation that Kane be arrested for releasing the documents in a bid to embarrass a critic. Gerald Shargel, one of Kane’s lawyers, said Kane vigorously denies any wrongdoing and would not resign if arrested. Kane, 49, is the first woman to be elected attorney general. Ferman is a Republican who is running for a judgeship in the fall election.
In December, a grand jury recommended that Kane be charged with obstruction, official oppression, perjury, false swearing, and contempt of court. The panel forwarded its findings to Ferman. The panel found that Kane released documents to the Philadelphia Daily News last March about a 2009 investigation headed by a former top state prosecutor, Frank Fina. The probe involved the financial dealings of J. Whyatt Mondesire, at the time the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP. Mondesire was not charged. The grand jury said Kane leaked the information to suggest that Fina bungled the investigation. Sources have said Kane blamed Fina for an article in the Inquirer last year saying that she secretly shut down a sting investigation that caught Philadelphia Democrats on tape accepting cash from an undercover informant. Fina, a top prosecutor under Kane’s Republican predecessors, ran the sting.