Kane: Investigators were given justice’s emails
HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office pushed back Wednesday on suggestions it did not provide all the offensive or explicit emails linked to state Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin during inquiries into his conduct last year.
Attorney General Kathleen Kane contended an internal review found t her office provided electronic versions of Eakin’s email exchanges including questionable content to a Supreme Court-appointed lawyer and officials from the state agency that investigates allegations of misconduct.
Both ultimately cleared Eakin. But the Judicial Conduct Board ended its investigation Dec. 9, before all of the allegedly offensive or explicit emails were made available, a Kane spokesman said.
Eakin is alleged to have swapped some of those emails with prosecutors.
Earlier this month, Kane described some of the emails from Eakin’s private Yahoo account in the name of “John Smith” as containing racially offensive jokes and misogynistic pornography. She gave the material anew to the Supreme Court and Judicial Conduct Board Sept. 30, saying it could violate judicial conduct rules.
Those rules require judges to be impartial, independent and avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
Descriptions of some of the emails appeared in Philadelphia Daily News reports this month, accounts Kane’s office said Wednesday were based on authentic copies of the emails.
The newspaper said Eakin sent an email in 2010 to a deputy attorney general that included a joke about a doctor telling a woman who was beaten by her husband, “You see how much keeping your mouth shut helps?”
A year earlier, the same prosecutor, Jeffrey Baxter, allegedly sent Eakin a video of a black woman complaining President Barack Obama’s efforts to create jobs would endanger her “government check.”
A telephone message left for Baxter, who works in the attorney general’s Medicaid fraud section in North Huntingdon, was not immediately returned.
In recent days, the Judicial Conduct Board’s chief counsel, Robert A. Graci, and Eakin’s Supreme Court colleagues said they did not have all the relevant information during their investigations last year.
The court-appointed lawyer, Robert L. Byer, echoed that sentiment in a Wednesday statement through his law firm, Duane Morris.
In addition to providing electronic versions of the emails last year, Kane said Wednesday that a special agent watched while Judicial Conduct Board officials reviewed some Eakin emails with “numerous photos and videos that contain nudity.”
Plus, Eakin presumably told investigators about all the “John Smith” emails, Kane’s spokesman Chuck Ardo said.
The board’s 2014 investigation of Eakin began after the Philadelphia Daily News reported he received two pornographic emails and one racially offensive email in his Yahoo email address in 2010.
Eakin, 66, a Republican and former Cumberland County district attorney, has not disputed descriptions of the emails. He has said he is cooperating with the ethics investigations.
Eakin issued a Tuesday statement through the court system that said it was “disconcerting and embarrassing to find others searching years of private personal emails looking for and publicizing any insensitive content.”