Pa. to release $400,000 porn email report - but it won't name names
HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office on Tuesday will release the long-awaited report on the exchange of pornography or offensive email on government servers, but it won't tell all: The names of all of the senders will be blacked out.
HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office on Tuesday will release the long-awaited report on the exchange of pornography or offensive email on government servers, but it won't tell all: The names of all of the senders will be blacked out.
Agency officials said labor contracts, privacy, and other concerns, including liability, prevent the Attorney General's Office from making public the unredacted report by Douglas Gansler, the special prosecutor hired nearly a year ago to investigate the Porngate scandal.
"Senior lawyers within the Office of Attorney General have expressed numerous concerns related to the release of names in the Gansler report," said Chuck Ardo, spokesman for Attorney General Bruce Beemer.
A news conference to release the report is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.
The decision to withhold names will likely be controversial. The email scandal has lingered for more than two years. Although some of the messages have been released, no one has made all of them publicly available.
And the Attorney General's Office has, to date, paid Gansler just under $400,000 for his firm's work on the report. The final bill is expected to come in much higher - although agency officials have privately questioned the quality of the report, setting the stage for a possible legal fight over Gansler's fees.
Gansler did not return calls Monday seeking comment.
In completing his inquiry during the summer, Gansler sent letters to anyone named in the main report - just under 50 people classified as "public officials" or "high-volume" senders that sent more than 50 emails between 2008 and 2015. He also sent notices to hundreds of employees in the Attorney General's Office and elsewhere identified in an appendix to the report as low-volume senders, having sent fewer than 50 messages.
Some of the low-volume senders sent as little as one message, according to sources familiar with the report. And some of the emails were innocuous, leading to concerns within the office that people's reputations would be unnecessarily sullied.
Former Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane, a Democrat, appointed Gansler last December, before she was convicted and sentenced on perjury and other charges.
Kane discovered after her election in 2012 that for years, agency staff had used state computers to exchange emails with pornography and messages with misogynistic, racial, and homophobic content. Some of the emails were exchanged with judges, defense lawyers, law enforcement officials, and private citizens.
Although she repeatedly promised to publicly release all of the emails, she never did. Instead, in the fall of 2014, she identified just eight people who exchanged pornography or otherwise offensive messages.
All eight had ties to a former state prosecutor with whom Kane was feuding, leading to criticism that she was using the messages as a weapon to exact revenge on perceived enemies.
Kane acknowledged at the time that dozens of employees in the Attorney General's Office had participated in the exchange, but said she could not identify them because of labor contracts.
Many others have been outed as participating in the exchange since then, but their names became public only because the messages became part of public court proceedings, many of them related to Kane's own criminal case. The 50-year-old Democrat had tried to argue that she was being railroaded by misogynist men in the criminal justice system who were incensed that she had discovered the messages.
The scandal that followed after Kane's initial release of emails cost several high-profile officials their jobs, including two state Supreme Court justices and a member of former Gov. Tom Corbett's cabinet.
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