Kane's office: No child porn among e-mails

HARRISBURG - On Tuesday night, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane went on national television and said children were depicted in some of the images her office discovered when reviewing pornographic e-mails exchanged among state employees.

Asked by a CNN reporter to describe the sexually explicit messages unearthed in the scandal, Kane said: "They are deplorable: hard-core, sometimes graphic, sometimes violent e-mails that had a string of videos and pictures depicting sometimes children, old women - some of them involved violent sexual acts against women."

By Wednesday morning, her office was tempering her statement, saying that while a handful of the e-mails included photos of young children, they did not constitute child pornography.

"We are not saying that it reached the level of child pornography," said Renee Martin, Kane's spokeswoman.

Martin insisted that Kane had not misspoken in the interview: "I think what she said is accurate. The images are deplorable. And some contained seniors and children."

Tuesday night's segment on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 reviewed the pornographic e-mail scandal that has roiled Harrisburg since Kane, a Democrat, released in late September the names of eight men who traded e-mails between 2008 and 2012 that contained sexually explicit content. The e-mails were discovered during her office's review of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual-abuse case.

The men were prosecutors and agents under her Republican predecessors, including now-Gov. Corbett. Five of the eight resigned their positions in the private and public sector in the wake of the scandal, while Kane's office has since fired, suspended, or disciplined about two dozen current employees for sending or receiving sexually explicit e-mails.

Without elaborating, Kane during her interview suggested that court orders had stymied a deeper investigation of the e-mail scandal.

"I knew that I was walking into public corruption, which again is why I ran" for office, she said. "But I will tell you this: Even I am shocked at the level of public corruption. I am shocked at how deep it goes. And I am shocked at how powerful it is. I have never seen anything like this. It's breathtaking."

Her unexpected reference to images involving children exploded like a bomb in legal and political circles. Possessing or trading child pornography is a crime that carries a jail term. Since the scandal broke, Kane's office had repeatedly denied finding anything akin to child pornography.

Minutes after the interview aired Tuesday night, one of Kane's attorneys, Lanny Davis, said he was aware of two images depicting children: one, a picture of a young boy peeking into the underwear of a little girl; the second, two toddlers, fully clothed, kissing on the lips.

Martin, the attorney general's spokeswoman, said she did not know whether Kane was referring to more than those two images.

Sources familiar with the e-mails obtained say the photos come from a collection called "Men in Training."

Davis did not give details about the images, including who in the Attorney General's Office sent or received them or when.

In the context of the larger cache of pornographic e-mails, Davis called the pictures "borderline" inappropriate.

David Chapman, a self-employed programmer who runs a rescue sanctuary for llamas in British Columbia, is one of many website operators who have posted the nine-photograph collection in recent years. Chapman, who put them on his own website, said he found the photos amusing, not pornographic.

"I saw no eroticism in them. They do not do anything for me but make me smile," Chapman said Wednesday.

"I would question the people who question the photograph," he added. "If someone sees them as pornographic, then I would suggest that they need to look within themselves."

Chapman noted that one of the photos in the set shows a mischievous boy urinating against a wall. "It's funny," he said. "That's what children do."

Citing another image, he said, "A child reaching for a pint of beer - that's pretty funny."

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