‘Porngate’ review: The million email march

The special prosecutor appointed by Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane to review material in the “porngate” scandal says he has more than a million emails to review.

Douglas Gansler, a former attorney general from Maryland, was named by Kane as a special deputy attorney general in charge of reviewing the material to prosecute any crimes or ethics offenses.

When Kane announced the appointment Dec. 1, everyone said there would be “tens of thousands” of emails to review. Now Gansler says it’s more than a million. Why so many?

“What we don’t want to do is rely on somebody else in the office of attorney general to tell us which emails we should review, and hold some back,” Gansler said in a phone interview. “So what we did is, we asked for all the emails that were available on the office of the attorney general server.”

That’s all email on the attorney general’s office going back to 2008.

Gansler says they won’t read every email. “We’ll take the over a million emails and be able to break it down by different codes, different words we’ll be looking for, different email addresses that we’ll want to look through, key words that we can find and use,” he said. “And that should narrow the universe down significantly.”

Gansler is charged with looking for evidence of sexually explicit and discriminatory content, as well as “evidence of improper collusion, lack of impartiality and independence, or obstruction of court proceedings or other government functions.”

Gansler is using a team from his Washington law firm, Buckley Sandler, to conduct the review.