PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: [Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen] Kane ignited the war in 2012, when she made a central theme of her campaign criticism of how [then-top prosecutor Frank] Fina‘s team in the Attorney General’s Office conducted the investigation into serial sex abuser Jerry Sandusky.[…] Though the review failed to back up Kane’s campaign rhetoric, it gave her a new and unexpected source of ammunition in the feud: Forensic computer work found that Fina, among dozens of others, had traded explicit [pornographic] photos and videos between 2008 and 2102 on state time on state computers. The X-rated e-mails were among other messages that included jokes, cartoons, and political commentary. It was not illegal, but it was a violation of office policy.
Throughout, Fina was publicly backed up in his defense of the Sandusky probe by old colleagues, including State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan, former top state prosecutor Richard Sheetz, and former [PA Attorney General’s office] agent Randy Feathers, the case’s lead investigator. All three later landed on the list of eight Kane named as having received pornographic e-mails while working in the Attorney General’s Office under Corbett or other Republicans. Also among them was [Christopher] Carusone, a prosecutor who, with Fina, was a key player in the Attorney General’s Office’s public corruption cases and who later became Corbett’s secretary of legislative affairs.
The others she named were E. Christopher Abruzzo, who became Corbett’s environmental secretary; Glenn Parno, a top lawyer for Abruzzo; Patrick Blessington, a former member of Fina’s anticorruption team who now works with him as a Philadelphia prosecutor; and Kevin Harley, Corbett’s onetime spokesman in the Attorney General’s Office and Governor’s Office. The fallout since that Sept. 25 bombshell has been pronounced.
Abruzzo and Parno resigned their government positions the week after the e-mail release. Sheetz stepped down as a prosecutor in Lancaster County. Corbett has asked Feathers to give up his position on the state parole board, a demand Feathers has thus far ignored. Last week, Carusone lost his job with a major Philadelphia law firm, though neither he nor the firm would discuss why. […] And last week, Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille urged his colleagues to take action after seeing e-mails that indicate Justice Seamus McCaffery had sent sexually explicit images to an agent in the Attorney General’s Office and to McCaffery’s brother, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge. MORE