AG Kane releases new round of porn emails the same day her law license is suspended

In another twist in Pennsylvania’s “Porngate” scandal, state Attorney General Kathleen Kane released another round of pornographic emails Thursday that were sent to the private email account of a state Supreme Court Justice. The latest email dump comes the same day Kane’s law license was officially suspended because of criminal charges pending against her in Montgomery County.

The roughly 50 emails Kane’s office released range from off-color jokes to photos of naked women, one with a pig nose and tail. They also include several videos, one showing a young woman ripping open her blouse at her family’s dinner table entited “When Your Daughter Wants to Get Her Ears Pierced.”

They were all sent to Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin’s private email account under the name “John Smith.”

In a letter to the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Thomas Saylor Tuesday, Kane called the emails “offensive.” She said in a statement Thursday that she released them to prove the state’s Judicial Conduct Board acted wrongly when it dismissed complaints against Eakin about the emails late last year.

The Judicial Conduct Board last Friday posted a report from December 2014 online in which the board’s chief counsel called the images “mildly pornographic or sexually suggestive” and found Eakin’s only flaw was in not asking his contacts to stop sending him such emails. 

“She finds them much more troubling,” said Kane spokesman Chuck Ardo. “I think she looks at them from a female perspective which does not seem to have happened in the prior reviews.”

Eakin’s lawyer, his wife, Heidi Eakin, did not respond to a request for comment. The justice has apologized previously, saying the emails “do not reflect my character or beliefs” and have not affected his actions on the bench.

Asked why Kane released the emails the same day her law license suspension took effect, Ardo said the two events were unrelated.

Kane has said that even without her law license, her office will continue to function.

Duquesne University Law School professor Bruce Ledewitz disagrees. 

“When a deputy attorney general goes into court, that deputy attorney general represents us and is standing in for the attorney general who represents us,” he said. “So when she lost her license to practice law, we lost all our attorneys in court.”

Kane faces perjury counts and other charges in Montgomery County for allegedly feeding secret grand jury information to a newspaper and attempting to cover it up. She maintains her innocence.