What a weird, winding road this tale has been.
According to Brad Bumsted of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Attorney General Kathleen Kane and Chief Justice Ron Castille will meet on Friday. At that meeting, Kane will hand over 4,000 emails that “top jurists” sent or received.
Castille has been trying to gain access to emails that judges may have sent and was quite vocal when the scandal first broke.
Last week, he commented that any judges associated with the email uproar would have to “pay the piper”.
A few days later, Steve Esack of Morning Call revealed that Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery (who does not have the best relationship with Chief Justice Castille) received and sent dozens of these emails.
Kane resisted sharing the emails with Castille last week but then the Chief Justice threatened to open disciplinary hearings on Kane since as Attorney General she is still “an officer of the court.”
In order to avoid this unlikely constitutional crisis, the two agreed to meet this week.
At this point, it is unclear what actions Castille might take or call for and how many judges the evidence indicates were involved. The only sure thing at this point is there is no sure thing.
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5 Responses
Larry-
1) You can always opposed a REQUEST.
2) Does Castille have the authority to ORDER, since it’s not a criminal offense? What is the statute-of-limitations on non-crime but fire-able offense of misusing state computers?
3) Castille’s REQUEST for the information can be handled by him coming over to view it, rather than it being sent, and risking dissemination.
I’m a little mystified as to why David and Observer think that the AG has some authority to oppose a request from the Chief Justice or any other judge. She’s not the Governor, and she’s a member of the bar. He’s higher on the totem pole than she is.
Castille is going to find that there are far more Republicans on that list of Bad-Boy judges, than there are Neanderthal Dems like Seamus. After all, who is more patronizing and miscogynistis than a Republican judicial appointee? When he sees the names of his GOP buddies dominating the list, he’ll finally shut his trap and that’s the last we’ll hear his grandstanding on this issue. He never had a chance in hell of making an ethics charge stick to the sitting Attorney General about this, and he made himself look unprofessional and stupider than usual by bringing it up. I think early-onset dementia may be setting in.
yet another high profile back fire for Kane
I don’t know if Kane should “hand over” the emails as that just creates more copies that could leak out, as Castille might need to involve his staffers in processing the information. Instead, I think she should allow Castille to view the emails and names from AG secure computer and produce whatever lists he needs in-house.
This should satisfy Castille’s need to review the information.