Several former top aides testify against AG Kane

During Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s criminal trial this week, several former top aides have taken the stand to testify against her.

There’s her most recent first deputy, Bruce Beemer who said his “heart sank a little” when Kane asked him to stop an investigation into the potential leak of secret investigative material to a Philadelphia Daily News reporter, a leak Beemer found “troubling” and the very thing Kane is accused of orchestrating. 

Then, there was David Peiffer, the special agent in charge of the AG’s criminal division who said he was “pissed to say the least” when he read the June 6, 2014 article referencing a transcript of an interview he had conducted with another special agent about a 2009 grand jury investigation. It is a transcript he said he showed Kane during a meeting in March, less than two months before the Daily News article came out.

And then, there was Adrian King, Kane’s ex-boyfriend from their Temple law school days in the early 1990s who remained her close friend and agreed to take an “80 percent pay cut” to become her second-in-command when she took office in January 2013.

Now, King claims Kane was trying to frame him for a crime she is accused of committing.

A little more than one month before he would leave the AG’s office and return to private practice, King said Kane asked him to deliver a package to political consultant Josh Morrow on his way home to Philadelphia from a meeting at the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Prosecutors say inside the package were confidential documents Kane was illegally leaking to a reporter. However, during cross examination, King testified he did not ask what was in the manila envelope she gave him or peek inside it.

“I did what she asked me to do,” he said. 

Seth Farber, one of Kane’s six defense attorneys, pushed King for several minutes about whether he understood the consequences if he, not the attorney general, had been charged with leaking the confidential documents and whether he was attempting to minimize his involvement in the case.

“I’ve not minimized anything,” King said. “I’ve told the truth.”

King’s testimony is expected to continue on Thursday when the trial resumes at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown.