Judge says Kane has not requested release of emails

A day after Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane called on a Montgomery County judge to authorize her to release emails from the so-called Porngate scandal, the judge said he would not do so because Kane had not filed a formal request with the court.

The emails, Judge William R. Carpenter said, have nothing to do with the criminal case against Kane, the first woman and Democrat to be elected attorney general in Pennsylvania.

Carpenter, a Republican who launched the grand jury investigation that led to the charges against Kane, defended his supervision of the panel and the work of the grand jurors.

"I made no decision based on politics, gender, anger, bias, or prejudice," he said in his statement.

Moreover, the judge said, Kane had not filed "any petition, pleading, motion, or other requests for court action" that required him to act.

Kane's spokesman, Chuck Ardo, said a formal request could soon come.

"It is my understanding that the attorney general's attorneys plan to file a motion seeking to lift the court order governing these emails sometime next week," he said.

Carpenter said the explicit emails Kane sought to make public had not been introduced as evidence to the grand jury.

How Kane's request for their release is related to the criminal case against her is unclear.

Kane, the state's highest-ranking law enforcement official, is charged with conspiracy, perjury, obstruction, official oppression, and other crimes for allegedly leaking confidential information to a newspaper in a bid to embarrass a critic.

On Wednesday, in her first public comment since prosecutors brought the case against her last week, Kane blamed her legal troubles on enemies trying to conceal their involvement in the porn emails. Her crackdown on the porn - and subsequent outing of some of its senders, Kane said, set in motion events that spawned a grand jury investigation and ultimately led to the charges against her.

Kane said Carpenter's "tortured" reasoning in his order had blocked her from naming all of those involved in the porn email.

The judicial order she criticized makes no mention of porn. Carpenter's protective order was designed to prevent retaliation against witnesses in a case unrelated to the porn emails.

He issued the order in August 2014. A month later, Kane did not see it as a barrier to publicly naming eight former state officials who had shared the material.

Five of the eight, including top appointees of former Gov. Tom Corbett, lost their jobs as a result.

Kane has never explained why she released only those eight names among the scores of former state employees who had shared in the emails.

And Kane has fought public-records requests - including one from The Inquirer - seeking the names of public officials who traded the emails.

On Thursday, Carpenter stood by the grand jury's performance.

The panel was "composed of honest, hardworking men and women, Democrats and Republicans, with various ethnic and employment backgrounds," Carpenter said. "I take this opportunity to thank them for their work."

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Inquirer staff writer Craig R. McCoy contributed to this article.