Heads start to roll, as porn emails from Corbett's guys spill forth

 CHRIS ABRUZZO , Gov. Corbett's appointed secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection, says he does not remember all that porn.

But Abruzzo took "full responsibility" yesterday for the explicit emails recovered from his archived inbox from when he was chief of staff to Corbett, who was then state attorney general.

Abruzzo and one of his top DEP staffers resigned, as Attorney General Kathleen Kane released to reporters those emails in a 1,200-page document dump that included the archived inboxes of two other former top Corbett deputies.

And there is more to come.

Another four inboxes of former Corbett deputies are due to be dumped in public today.

Sources familiar with the emails say that William Ryan Jr., once Corbett's first deputy in the Attorney General's Office and now chairman of the state Gaming Control Board, also turns up in the archive of email porn.

It was not clear yesterday if Ryan only received the emails, or if he also sent or forwarded them.

Corbett appointed Ryan, who served as acting attorney general for four months in 2011, to a second three-year term on the Gaming Control Board in July.

Ryan did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Abruzzo was the first but not the last former Corbett deputy jerked from a government job in a seedy scandal that has transfixed the Capitol since Kane put on display for the media last week the hard-core pictures and videos.

A top DEP lawyer, Glenn Parno, also resigned yesterday.

Parno, who oversaw oil and gas regulation in the state, was a former Corbett deputy in the Attorney General's Office.

A review of the emails yesterday showed that racist and conservative memes were mixed in with the sexually explicit images.

Abruzzo, Parno, former Secretary of Legislative Affairs Chris Carusone and former Corbett press secretary Kevin Harley, all received a 2009 email saying that "it has become very difficult to distinguish the good towel-heads from the bad towel-heads," a common slur against Muslims.

That group also received a 2009 email suggesting that flight attendants be replaced by strippers because "Muslims would be afraid to get on planes for fear of seeing naked women. Hijackings would come to a screeching halt, and the airline industry would see record revenues."

Carusone's inbox contained a selection of pictures purporting to be President Obama's late mother posing nude years ago.

"Can you imagine the widespread play these pictures would be getting by the mainstream media if this had been [U.S. Sen.] John McCain's mother, or [former Alaska Gov.] Sarah Palin's mother?" the April 2009 email asks, 2 1/2 months after Obama was sworn in for his first term. "But you won't ever see these pictures anywhere in a regular media outlet."

Abruzzo pleaded ignorance - not in how he thinks of women, minorities and the media - but in how his memory functions.

"While I have no recollection of the specific accounts described by the media, I accept full responsibility for any lack of judgment I may have exhibited in 2009," Abruzzo wrote to Corbett in tendering his resignation yesterday. "I do not condone that behavior and it is not a reflection of the person or professional that I am."

Let's refresh Abruzzo's memory about his stash of porn, based on the videos that Kane showed the media last week:

* One shows a man dressed as a race-car driver shaking a bottle of champagne, uncorking it and then inserting the spouting mouth of the bottle into a woman's vagina as a group of people cheers him on. The driver then quaffs some of the bubbly (and not from the bottle).

* Another video, dubbed "safe sex," shows a skinny man attempting sex with a morbidly obese woman's stomach.

* Three more videos show a woman performing oral sex while speaking on the phone, a woman masturbating with a tub faucet, and busty women in wet shirts using their breasts to wash a car.

Abruzzo's resignation speeds the timetable for a job that might have ended anyway for him in 3 1/2 months, when the next governor of Pennsylvania is sworn in Jan. 20.

Polls show Democrat Tom Wolf with a double-digit lead on Corbett in the Nov. 4 general election, now only about a month away.

Kane's staff yesterday also dumped the inbox of State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan.

The images released last week from Noonan's inbox showed a series of mock motivational posters, suggesting that women could advance their careers by having oral, vaginal and anal sex with their male bosses.

Corbett, who got the same information yesterday as the media, issued a statement claiming that it showed "Noonan's account indicates that he did not participate in opening, originating, forwarding or replying to any message."

Many of the emails released yesterday were duplicates or had just one line of text on a page or went on for pages with computer coding that looked like gibberish.

The emails did not include the attachments - pictures and videos - shown to the media but not released by Kane last week.

The Morning Call of Allentown yesterday reported that state Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery was among the people who sent the emails to attorney general staffers, using a personal email account.

McCaffery's lawyer, Dion Rassias, responded with a statement questioning why "a half dozen private emails, allegedly from Justice McCaffery's personal computer, are front-page news."

Due to be released today are the emails of Harley; state Board of Probation and Parole member Randy Feathers; Richard Sheetz Jr., who works for the Lancaster County District Attorney; and Patrick Blessington, who works for Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams.

Sources have said that Frank Fina and Marc Costanzo, who also now work for Williams, were among the emailers.

Many of the names of people who sent or received the emails are redacted in the documents released yesterday.

Kane spokeswoman Renee George Martin said last week that her office redacted the names of current employees. She also said there are some "restrictions, upon which we cannot elaborate" for some redacted names.

Fina went to court in August to block the release of the emails.

A judge overseeing statewide grand juries denied that request two weeks ago. Another judge supervising grand juries may still have such an order in place.

Kane ran for office in 2012 criticizing Corbett and his deputies for the pace of the child-sex-abuse investigation that sent former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky to prison.

She commissioned a review of that case after taking office.

Ryan, a 14-year veteran of the Attorney General's Office, played a curious role in the email search.

The review, released in June, said that Ryan, as acting attorney general after Corbett took office as governor in 2011, ordered a change to the office's email-retention policy. Emails that previously had been held for five years were to be deleted after six months, under that order.

Kane's staff had to reconstruct and recover the emails from the office's computer servers to complete the Sandusky review. That's when the porn was discovered.

Phone: 215-854-5973

On Twitter: @ChrisBrennanDN

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