Judicial panel indicates Kane withheld Eakin emails

The Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board on Friday effectively accused state Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane of holding back offensive emails of Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin, suggesting she had undermined its investigation of the justice.

Last year, the board cleared Eakin of any wrongdoing in connection with his emails, but it said Friday that it now believes it was "not provided with all of the information on the attorney general's servers."

Kane's spokesman, Chuck Ardo, insisted later Friday that her office had provided the board with every email stored on its servers because Eakin had exchanged messages with agency staff.

"It was the attorney general's understanding that all the emails were turned over to the Judicial Conduct Board last year - and we will conduct an immediate review to determine if there is a discrepancy," Ardo said.

The board provided the unusual glimpse into its normally secret process after the disclosure in news stories that Eakin had sent or received at least 15 emails that mocked domestic-abuse victims, African Americans, Latinos, and gays, as well as some messages with salacious photos.

The issue of why the board had cleared Eakin arose this month when Kane said her office had uncovered "racial, misogynistic pornography" in the justice's emails. The messages passed through her office's computer servers as he exchanged messages with friends on her staff.

In the board statement, the agency's counsel, Robert A. Graci, said that "any investigation by any agency necessarily relies on the full disclosure" of information.

"However," he added, "recent revelations . . . demonstrate that the board was not provided with all the information on the attorney general's servers" related to Eakin.

While not explicitly saying that Kane kept information from the board, the statement was clear that the board had concluded it was somehow given an incomplete set of Eakin emails from the agency servers. It was Kane's office that controlled those servers when she provided the material to the board last year.

She publicly raised the issue of Eakin's emails on Oct. 1, about 10 days after the Supreme Court unanimously voted to suspend her law license pending the outcome of the criminal case against her. At that time, she said she had newly provided the board with another copy of Eakin's emails.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Ronald D. Castille, who pushed Kane last year to reveal information about any judicial ties to the emails, said he was stunned by the board's statement.

If Kane had withheld information, he said, "it constitutes a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct" for lawyers.

"That this kind of thing is going on is outrageous," said Castille, a Republican.

Kane, the first Democrat and woman elected attorney general, leveled her accusation at Eakin after she emerged from her arraignment on a new charge of perjury in the criminal case against her. She is awaiting trial on perjury, conspiracy, and other charges in connection with her alleged leak of confidential information to embarrass a critic.

Kane first raised an alarm a year ago about the sharing of pornographic emails on taxpayer-paid computers. She said she had discovered by chance that a network of judges, state and federal prosecutors, defense lawyers, detectives, and others had been exchanging such material in messages captured on her office's servers as they passed among senders and recipients.

Castille then pressured Kane into granting the court access to the servers so they could be searched for any offensive emails sent or received by members of the Supreme Court.

As a result, the high court disclosed that Justice Seamus P. McCaffery, a Democrat, over several years had sent 234 emails containing more than 700 pornographic photos and videos.

The Supreme Court suspended McCaffery in October of last year. A week after the suspension, he retired from public life after Eakin said McCaffery had called him and threatened him with the disclosure of inappropriate emails, saying he was "not going down alone." McCaffery disputed Eakin's account.

When the scandal broke out, the Judicial Conduct Board as well as an outside expert hired by the Supreme Court began looking at the emails involving Eakin.

The board cleared him. The expert, Pittsburgh lawyer Robert Byer, found only one sexually explicit message received by Eakin.

Eakin, 66, a Republican and the high court's liaison with the Philadelphia court system, was elected to the Supreme Court in 2001. His term ends in 2019.

He has declined comment beyond saying he is cooperating with the new review by the Judicial Conduct Board.

When she first spoke of the offensive emails last year, Kane made no mention of any concern about Eakin's emails. She raised the issue for the first time on Oct. 1 in her remarks after her arraignment.

In recent days, Kane's office has explained the delay this way: Last year, she left it to aides to review the content of the emails, and only recently did she realize Eakin's emails contained troubling material.

Her aides say she looked anew at the emails after a Sept. 11 request from the Philadelphia Daily News under the state Right-to-Know law seeking information on Eakin's emails.

cmccoy@phillynews.com215-854-4821 @CraigRMcCoy