Jeff Gannon, National Press Club    top   

• Americablog  John Aravosis, x-rated photographs, shocking, Gannon's anti-gay writing, "A Man Called Jeff"...
• Agitprops  and 21 Republicans block
• Antiwar, Jeff Gannon  
• Antiwar, Sex Lies and Jeff Gannon
• BlueStateBlogs, Judiciary Committee to vote on Gannon Resolution, 
•   Link Franklin Scandal Omaha and White House Call Boy Ring 1989,    Is there a common thread between the sexual abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib,  Guantanamo,  the Franklin Cover-up Scandal - Omaha  (1989), Catholic and Protestant clergy sexual abuse, GOP leadership cover-up of the Foley affair, ... Jeff Gannon White House sleepovers, Clinton sexual adventures, Deborah Jeane Palfrey
• BushStole04 White House press secretary Scott McClellan told ePluribus Media that his office had never requested a 30-day security clearance for James D. Guckert, aka "Jeff Gannon," directly contradicting a statement made earlier that day by the U.S. Secret Service  and BushStole04 secret journal Russia
• Code Pink, subject of Gannon story.
• CommonGroundCommonSense "New Leads in Johnny Gosch Case, Gannon Guckert. "
• Conspiracy Planet
• Crooks and Liars
• DailyKos
• DailyKos, Bobby Eberle, search terms: Lockheed Martin, aerospace engineer, Young Republicans, Texas Lyceum Association, 
• Democrats.com I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.  In 2003, New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey was forced to resign over a secret gay affair.  ... So what about George Bush and this man James Dale Guckert  a $200/hour gay male prostitute?  Did George W. Bush Have Sex with That Man, James Guckert?  I did not have sexual relations with that man, James Gannon. Blackmail?
• ePluribusMedia, Gannon, Eberle, Oliver North, 
• ePluribusMedia, Gannon, plagiarism
• Feinstein mentioned these investigations at the Kyle Sampson hearing: Roy Blunt, Foggo, Wilkes, Givens, McKay, Bogden,
• FranklinFiles "Federal agents linked recently resigned Representative Mark Foley (R-16-FL) to Abramoff and Gannon who allegedly acted as “facilitators for the poker parties and an elaborate prostitution ring of pedophiles and extortion-friendly homosexuals-in-the-closet serving elements of the Republican leadership,” he said."
• Iamtrex  and then inevitably join Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Matt “Rod Majors” Sanchez, and Jeannette Pelfrey on the big slag heap of discarded DC sex toys,
• LeftCoaster Treasongate and Jeff Gannon, interview with Ambassador. Joseph Wilson, (MensNewsDaily text of interview) search terms: INR memo, Wall Street Journal,  date discrepancy, interest by Patrick Fitzgerald...and Gannon's serial plagiarism, and research whether Gannon actually received a copy of the INR, 
• LiberalAvenger, Scott McClellan, gay, connection to Jeff Gannon, Guckert.
• MediaMatters Gannon, Guckert  INR, Froomkin, Plame leak, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 
• Media Matters,  "TalonNews.com and GOPUSA.com are registered to the same address in Pearland, Texas, which appears to be Eberle's personal residence..?
• mydd Rick Dunham, NPC, 
• Oil Empire  Blackmail?
• Pacific Gatepost, McClellan, Gannon
• People's Forum, The  Gannon, articles on Pressblog.
• ProRev blackmail in Washington D. C. Blackmail?
• Planetsean blog, Gannon, Bobby Eberle, Bruce Eberle ???
• RawStory "Secret Service records raise new questions about discredited conservative reporter ...documents, obtained by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal Guckert had remarkable access to the White House  ...  
• Salon
• Slaughter, Louise, Rep... VoteLouise  more
• Sourcewatch Gannon ... More below
• StewWeb Gannon, Abramoff, Rove sex operations
• TBRNews access logs
• Think Progress Jun 08 Gannon blogs, NPC, more below, 
• TruthSeeker Gannon's secret journal, will it be published
• WayneMadsenReport in Online Journal website "The recent scandal involving gay male escort and right-wing faux journalist Jeff Gannon (a.k.a. James Dale Guckert and possibly a few other aliases) is not welcome news for the purported sadomasochistic hedonists in the White House administrations of both George W. and George H. W. Bush ... see Gannongate
• Wonkette search Gannon, 
• Notes: Gannon interviewed Joe Wilson after Valerie Plame's identity revealed by Novak, asked Wilson about "an internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel [detailing] a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports."  
• Washington Blade Gannon 08
• Wonkette 'Tight Hole Operations" 10 Questions for Jeff Gannon
• You Will Anyway

• Summary Radar Online "Did Scott McClellan Give Jeff Gannon Special Access? Why would the National Press Club allow itself to be seen associating itself with such sordid affairs? There are tens of thousands of more credible news websites than Gannon's. Why did McClellan omit any reference to Gannon in his recent book. 'What Happened ...'?   Jeff Gannon.com, real name: James Dale Guckert Blackmail? Gannon has no training, or professional experience in journalism ...yet he sits at the speakers table of the National Press Club with Cheney, wife and daughter. YouTube Was he given a copy of the INR from Bureau of Intelligence and Research  Media Matters Who set up his interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson ... smells!  (Antiwar & interview) and Washington Post  text and more below Editor & Publisher Gannon is now a member of the National Press Club  His sponsor is Richard Dunham of the Houston Chronicle, formerly of BusinessWeek and someone else he doesn't remember. Think Progress Jun 08 Gannon blogs, NPC, more below,  New York Times Democrats Want Investigation   CBS News Salon  Gannon 05 Washington Blade Gannon 05 Over two dozen visits to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. SECRET SERVICE ACCESS RECORDS below. and a  'very affectionate' George W. Bush. Salon Rep. John Conyers, FOIA request for Secret Service White House Access Control Records, 2005  Gannon, a 'reporter' for Talon News, owned and operated by Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA   ePluribusMedia  Gannon's plagiarism. See Franklingate and research on how this all fits with GOP pattern of sexual deviance Richard Dunham is no relation to Obama's mother  Ann Dunham of Kansas who met Barack Obama, Sr. at the University of Hawaii and married on February 2, 1961 YouTube Bush OB-GYN, love

• Ancapistan typepad ... definitive post on JD's porn webmaster career by blogslut,.. Jeff Gannon was an adult porn webmaster, search terms: bulldog, Malecorps.com is not an escort service, affiliated program, Gannon photos, 
• Answers   Jeff "Gannon, Crist, Foley, Haggard... who knew the GOP was having a coming out party? We could have been supportive of their decisions to give oral sex to male prostitutes but they went and outlawed it....  MORE BELOW
• Rove, Gannon, White House, what are the connections? Who authorized Gannon's presence in the news briefings.
• APFN  Gannon is Gosch  
• APFN Gannon Blackmail?
• Aphrodisiology  The Psychosexual Control of Republican Politicians  Lyndon Banes Johnson: "Or as our first President from Texas once said, you should never trust a man unless you have his pecker in your pocket."
• CBS News
• DCCC Democratic Congressional Committee, Gannongate vote, "who at the White House paved the way for Mr. Guckert to have repeated and staged access to the President?"
• Des Moines former, editor James Gannon
• The Hill  Slaughter and Conyers
• MensNewsDaily, Gannon interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson
• Milkhouse blog, Gannon is Gosch
• Perkel, Marc Gannon, Gosch, Rove
• Short News  From Gay Escort to Conservative Reporter to National Press Club Activist and Blogger,  .... a gay conservative, he was the editor of his high school paper, and attended a two-day seminar, 
• TBR News, Gannon sleepovers at the White House ... using a Secret Service day pass, visited the White House 196 times in two years, and spent the night 12 times! That’s right, spent the night 12 times. copy
• Telegraph Larry Sinclair, Obama lurid claims.
• The Pundit Guy  "... like inviting a turkey to Thanksgiving diner".
• Wikipedia Jeff Gannon "James Dale Guckert (born 1958) worked under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon as a White House reporter between 2003 and 2005, representing Talon News. After Guckert came under public scrutiny, in particular for his lack of a significant journalistic background and involvement with various homosexual escort service websites using the professional name Bulldog, he resigned from Talon News on February 8, 2005."
• White House Press Corp
• Wilmington News-Journal, Guckert income tax.  

• Carlton Ritz, Abramoff, Sheraton, 
• Rick Dunham, Gannon's NPC sponsor ... he forgets who the other one is.
• Rick Dunham, Houston Chronicle, cover-up of  Roland Carnaby, CIA Southeastern Regional Chief, assassinated by Houston Police....MORE
• Eberle, 
• CBS News Rove / Gannon connection
• CannonFire, Gannon / Sun Myung Moon connection and Rick Ross Unification Church
• CBS News "Lights Out for Talon News Eberle Communications
• CNN, Gannon Blitzer, transcripts,  file
• Exposejessejackson.com
• JeffGannon.com  Jeff Bulldog escort ad
• Gibbs, Joe
• GOPUSA 'bringing the conservative message to America'
• HotMilitaryStud.com
• Mark Grossman, Israel, Urban Moving Systems, 9/11 teams infiltrated by Mossad, all fingered by Plame, thats why she was outed.
• Gannon, Guckert, spent many nights in the White House,  White House visits when no news briefings, many with no record of entry or exit.  MORE
• James P. Gannon is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and editor of The Des Moines Register 
• Jeff Gannon.com "A Voice of the New Media".. search White House visits.  never obtained 'hard pass' to WH briefings, said photos on gay websites were "unsubstantiated rumors",  Gannon had foreknowledge of the Iraq Invasion and interviewed Joseph Wilson, so there was reason to include him in McClellan's book.
• GayPatriot, The Internet Home  for the Gay Conservative.   
• GOPUSA and Talon News, Pearland, Texas.
• Helium  partners with NPC
• MilitaryEscorts.com
• North American Enterprises, Oliver North, Franklin Community Credit Union, Omaha, 
• Judicial Inc.biz  Blackmail?
• Log Cabin Republicans.
• National Press Club  Record, search Jeff Gannon. serves on New Media Committee, sought to join the club in 2006, he's the first exclusively online reporter to cover the WH, his website 'Jeff Gannon - A Voice of the New Media and book 'The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report."  is self-published, was he responsible in some way for inviting Jeremiah Wright appearance?....
• National Press Club Pressblogenlarge
• New York Times  file
• and New York Times
• RenewAmerica, Allen Keyes, The re-whitewashing of pedophile Alfred Kinsey
• Talon News, Gannon forced to resign in 2005, questions about access to presidential briefings, and pseudonym, ties to gay sex websites, Eberle, GOP activist, served as a delegate to the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Texas Republican Convention and the 2000 National Convention, Gannon's syndicated column: "Jeff Gannon's Washington", and RIGHTALK, 
• Texas Christian Coalition, Bobby Eberle,
• Notes: Victor Ashe, William Frist, Barney Frank, Robert Dryer, Bush, Jack Abramoff poker parties,
• Washington Post "Online Nude Photos Are Latest Chapter In Jeff Gannon Saga  ...  The Jeff Gannon story is still bouncing around the Internet, and now there are pictures.   search: Deep Throat, James Dale Guckert, Wolf Blitzer, Kerry, Paul Leddy, gay escort site,  Bedrock Corporation -Delaware,  Gannon covered White House beginning March 2003, military, muscular, masculine, discrete,  ... 
• 
• Worthy Creators, gay rehabilitation center,
• Youth for Tomorrow Bruce Eberle, Oliver North, Brit Hume, board
• Washington Post, Gannon quits White House   and "It was Olbermann who said in 2005 that "whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about 'media credibility,' I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times." (Gannon, a conservative blogger with an X-rated past, now says "Scott McClellan's credibility is zero.")   and WP search Karl Rove, Scott McClellan, Jeff Gannon
• notes: fascist in Hitler's Germany , Franco's Spain , and "The Colonels'" Greece , now Bush associated with a predilection for sex with children and young military recruits
• Weekly Standard ""Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered The taboo against sex with children continues to erode. by Mary Eberstadt"
• notes: Once that one crucial piece of information (Was it Karl? Scott? Dubya hisself?) is extracted from you, you will enjoy a brief, heady spasm of money and attention, and then inevitably join Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Matt “Rod Majors” Sanchez, and Jeannette Pelfrey on the big slag heap of discarded DC sex toys, a footnote to a nasty bit of Beltway gossip. And then what will you do? I’ve seen some more recent photos of you, and it looks like those washboard abs of yours have gone the way of Saddam’s WMD’s. source: Iamtrex, letter to Gannon

• Conspiracy Planet "One of the key people in this network (I wouldn't call it a conspiracy) is one Todd Blodgett. Blodgett is the head of an advertising or PR agency in DC, called the TAD Agency.  ...  Blodgett first emerges in the 1989 Washington Times expose of gay escorts being taken on midnight tours of the Reagan/Bush White House. These tours were organized by Craig Spence, an associate of Lawrence King of the Franklin credit union S&L looting/boy prostitution scandal.  ...  It is frequently claimed that Spence recorded his clients and used his lists/recordings for blackmail and political power purposes. He also claimed to be working for the CIA, although those claims could have been self-serving attempts to deflect prosecution.  ...  At the time this story broke, one person publicly identified as caught up in the credit card lists was Todd Blodgett. The credit card was used to pay for prostitutes, but he always maintained that he allowed a friend to use his card.  ...  At the time, Blodgett was a protege of Lee Atwater, carrying out negative research on Democrats."
• Think Progress "Gannon blogs at the National Press Club’s website.Filed Under: Media By Amanda on Jun 17th, 2008 at 3:51 pm Jeff Gannon blogs at the National Press Club’s website.» Poblano at DailyKos notes that disgraced “reporter” Jeff Gannon is blogging at the National Press Club (NPC). Gannon gained notoriety as the former male escort who, for two years, gained a White House press pass using a pseudonym. There appear to be seven active blogs on the NPC’s site, including Gannon’s. Steve O’Hearn, chairman of the NPC’s new media committee — of which Gannon is also a member — told ThinkProgress that the “current policy” is that any NPC member can have a blog on the organization’s site, although it’s so far mostly members of the committee. Gannon’s most recent post goes after CodePink and its “ties to terrorists and repressive regimes around the world.”
• LeftCoaster "this is the infamous question that Gannon asked Wilson in that interview: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
• MediaMatters  ... the softball question "Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"  and more.
• Online Journal That is, come on over whenever you like. And he did. In a previous article, (LookingGlassNews) Keeping Hunter Thompson’s death alive, I wrote that “Gannon/Guckert visited the White House 196 times -- 39 of them days when there were no press briefings." In fact the Secret Service could not account for him checking out on many days when he checked in. Now who would his sleepovers have been with? Karl Rove, rumored to have been light in the loafers, a denizen of certain gay bars inside the Beltway? Or could it have been the president himself. Gannon was seen hugging Junior several times for the cameras. Then there was that Bush kiss with Prince Bandar.
• National Press Club   speakers table: Jerry Zremzky, Washington Bureau Chief, Buffalo News; Chris Berry, Newstalk 630, Pres. & GM WMAL; Laura Robertson, International Producer for CBN News;  April Ryan, WH correspondent, American Urban Radio Network;  Pete Williams,  NBC News Justice Correspondent;  Kathryn Sceebo, WC, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal; Clarence Page, Syndicated Columnist, Chicago Tribune;  Elizabeth 'Liz' Cheney, Lynn Cheney, Dick Cheney;  Melissa Charvanel, NPC Speakers Committee, & Vice Chair, and  CBN News;  Rick Dunham; Betsy Fischer, Executive Producer, Meet the Press;  Kelly Wright, Fox News Correspondent, host of Fox & Friends Weekend; Margaret Sullivan, director, Center for International Media Assistance
• Washington Post "Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.   ....    CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting.    ....    "It has been circulated around," one official said. CIA and State Department officials have refused to discuss the document.    ....    On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner (Gannon) asks: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"

• WayneMadsenReport "Presidential adviser Karl Rove has been implicated by child welfare advocates in Texas in the failure of the Justice Department to prosecute the Texas child abuse and pedophilia cases. Indictments in the case prepared by the US Attorney for West Texas were reportedly spiked on the orders of the White House and Justice Department."  Congress and the FBI should take a close look at Alberto Gonzales, Albert Moskowitz, Johnny Sutton, Bill Baumann, and Karl Rove.
• Flocco "According to U.S. intelligence sources, President Bush obstructed justice last December when he had senior advisor Karl Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers instruct Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to fire eight U.S. attorneys who were among several others conducting ongoing public corruption and secret national security grand jury investigations connected to an espionage–linked prostitution / pedophile sex ring operating at the Washington Ritz-Carlton and other DC hotels, whose clients included U.S. senators and congressmen, elite Washington news reporters and high government officials—some of whom were named by an intelligence insider.  Central to the scandal is fired U.S. attorney Carole Lam of California who was reportedly conducting testimony before grand juries linking indicted former Bush CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo and convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff to the sex ring, Israeli espionage, GOP Under Secretary of Defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, a forged British intelligence dossier used by Mr. Bush to deceive Americans into supporting war against Iraq and an attempt to plant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the war via an intelligence pipeline through Dubai and Turkey.  During her House testimony before Democrat Chairman Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last Friday, “national security” concerns were given as the reason for prohibiting covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson from revealing that her CIA energy front company Brewster-Jennings had prevented the planting of WMD in Iraq by the White House-linked intelligence pipeline, resulting in the forged British dossier being used for building an artificial case for war against Iraq."
• Clyde Lewis One witness Alisha Jahn Owen testified before a grand jury that she was sexually abused as a juvenile by a Nebraska district court judge, by the chief of police of the city of Omaha, by the manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, and others.  Alisha Owen also witnessed, she said, the abuse of other children by figures in Nebraska’s political and financial establishment whom she named, among them the publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, the Omaha World–Herald. She testified that she was in a group of Nebraska children who functioned for years as illegal drug couriers, traveling nationwide for some of Nebraska’s wealthiest, most powerful and prominent businessmen.  Two grand juries, one local and one federal, had a mandate to consider these and other charges of child abuse connected with the Franklin Credit Union. They indicted the victim–witnesses for perjury instead!  Alisha Owen was pronounced guilty by a jury in Douglas County, Nebraska, on eight counts of felony perjury. On August 8, 1991, she was sentenced to serve nine to twenty–seven years in prison.
• National Vanguard "a column by Drew Pearson appeared in the New York Post, reporting that “‘a homosexual ring had been operating out of Governor Reagan’s office’ for six months with his full knowledge and that the governor did not act until pressured by aides into firing the men. The columnist alleged that Art Van Court [Reagan’s bodyguard, later a federal marshal, who conducted the investigation into the affair] had a tape recording ‘of a [homosexual] sex orgy which had taken place at a cabin near Lake Tahoe, leased by two members of Reagan’s staff.’”  Reagan “denied everything and called the columnist a liar.” At a press conference he “slammed his fist on the lectern and yelled at reporters,” refusing to identify the two men.  “The Reagans immediately adopted a censorious public stance toward homosexuality. He condemned it as ‘an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,’ and she denounced it as a ‘sickness’ and an ‘abnormality’ Yet privately, they continued to patronize their astrologer, Carroll Righter, a homosexual, and to socialize with a homosexual male couple who were frequently invited to the [Jewish] Bloomingdales’ dinner parties. Nancy maintained close relationships with [Gentile author] Truman Capote, [Jewish attorney and former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy] Roy Cohn, and [Jew] Jerry Zipkin, who once lived with [English novelist] Somerset Maugham; she depended on homosexual men like her hairdresser and interior decorator to define her style and execute her taste.” (Kelley, 165-167)"  coast to coast, Nebel death, 
• a young girl, Eulice (Lisa) Washington, was the center of an investigation by Andrea L. Carener, of the Nebraska Department of Social Services. The investigation was instigated because Lisa and her sister Tracey continually ran away from their foster parents, Jarrett and Barbara Webb. Initially reluctant to disclose information for fear of being further punished, the two girls eventually recounted a remarkable story, later backed up by OTHER children who had been fostered out to the Webb's [sic].  
• Search term notes from Franklin Coverup pdf: notes: 1985, .......         child abuse, ebook by Happytribe, Columbine -antidepressant drub cover-up, Troy Boner - FBI - Ted Gunderson.  ( Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr, William Colby, Ronald Roskins - AID, all related Larry King affair).   Nebraska legislature investigative committee, single-engine plane crash that killed Gary Caradori and his son.  Wealthiest businessmen of Omaha Nebraska.  Alisha Owen guilty of perjury, Douglas County, she told grand jury she was sexually abused as a juvenile by the chief of police and Larry King, and witnessed others being abused by the publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, said she was forced to courier drugs.  Paul Bonacci also charged with perjury.  Lawrence E. King, Jr., was an officer in the National Black Republican Council, he sang the national anthem at the 1984 and 1988 GOP national conventions. Nearly $40 million missing from Franklin Community Credit Union, revelations that Franklin's officers and prominent Republican Nebraskans had flown children from city to city to be abused.  Most unaware of case, locals told its closed, Larry King served jail sentence for misappropriation of funds, after guilty plea, officials said no evidence of drug peddling, child abuse, satanic activity, all just a carefully crafted hoax. Legislative investigation started 1988 ended 1991, main investigator: the late Gary Caradori.  Committee chairman Senator Loran Schmit, case leads to drug-trafficking, money laundering, pornography, kidnapping and sale of children.  Caradori wrote to Nebraska Secretary of State Alan Beerman about threats.   Phone taps.  Caradori and his son died in plane crash July 11 in Lee County, Illinois.  Early the next day FBI subpoened all his records.  Days Inn Lakefront Motel ... no records of his stay.  June 21, 1991 case shut down, Bonacci charges dropped.  First alarm: 1985: Washington County, DSS, case: Sean, Sally, Steve McArthur in foster care with Jarrett and Barbara Webb, Fort Calhoun, child abuse complaint, Webb worked for Omaha Public Power District and was board member of FCFCU, Barbara is Larry King's cousin.  As many as nine children in the home, sexual abuse.  Attorney Gary Randal, brother Casey Randal was in orbit of Franklin Credit.  State suspended Webb's foster care license 1986, Prosecutor Patrick Tripp did not file sexual abuse charges against Webb, called them liars. Julie Walters a youth care worker noted Webb attitude.  Polygraph tests showed Webb children telling truth.  Pat Tripp 'good friends' with Deward Finch and Kent Miller named by Nelly and Kimberly.  Also in Walter's report: Nelly and Kimberly found porn tapes under Webb's bed showing teenage sexual activity, said King supplied tapes.  Parties, boys from Boystown in summer of 84, sexual activity. More Julie Walters' report turned over to law enforcement agencies 1986, and DSS logs available. Margo Georgiu and daughter Brenda Parker file complaint against Rusty Nelson 'possible child pornography', Larry King, 'the boss', opulent apartment, nude photographs, Nelson homosexual,  King influential in Republican Party.  Loretta Smith, hospitalized at Richard Young Hospital, photographed nude, devil worship, Nelly and Kimberly Webb, nude modeling of children, North Omaha Girls Club, killed if refused to participate, drugged, Webb girls reported to police but nothing done.  Fort Calhoun Schools, Mr. Finch did nothing about child porn reports, Loretta Isabel Smith mentioned Larry King.  Gary West, King's Wirt Street house,  parties.  Loretta Smith's hospital reports: witnessed child homicides, cult activities, Ray, got high, parties, ten men in their mid thirties, Loretta only nine years old, would be killed it they told of activities, drugged, decapitation, id Larry King, Mr. Finch, Ace, King Horse, Jerry Lucifer, Mike, Loretta called police, said she was raped, cannablism, Foster Care Review Board said Smith testimony highly credible, significant details, Webb, Georgiu corroboration.  Dennis Carlson NFCRB, officers kept Wadman away from investigation, fearing he was protecting King's activities, Investigator Carmean and Investigator Hoch lost all interest in the case, transferred out, pulled out. Wadman tried to get Carmean declard crazy,  Omaha Public Safety Directo Pitmon Fox (cousin of Larry King) said Carmean needed mental health evaluation, Officer Bill Skoleski died of heart attack also kept file on Larry King.  Radio station KKAR said child abuse attention prurient, inappropriate, Wadman said all investigations were 'dead end'.  Wadman said he barely knew King, suitcase release.  Legislative Franklin committee counsel include: John Stevens Berry, Robert Creager, and Wadman's attorney Kent Whinnery, investigation goes nowhere.  Cover-up.  NFCRB received child abuse reports and frustrated that nothing was done, Director Carol Sitt, 1988 spoke with Nebraska's Republican governor Kay Orr, she said 'do whatever is necessary' to secure investigation, wrote to Attorney General Robert Spire, had detailed abuse by victims, received call from Kirsten Hallberg, added Uta Halee Girls Village report on Larry King, turned files over to Spire, nothing happened for months, Stitt and Dennis Carlson demanded meeting with Howland, Nov 22, 1988, nothing, contacted governor again, Thomas Vlahoulis put on case, part time, nothing done.  Sitt went to Douglas County.  Val Peter, Boys Town, FBI intimidation of Loretta Smith, Senator Loran Schmit asked Carol Sitt what effect the gross mishandling of her case might have on Loretta Smith, all cover-up. 1983, Copple family, Commonwealth Savings ante up assets to redeem depositor losses, Bob Kerry governor, and State Security Savings, Bill Wright, used powers of state government to loot State Security's depositors, cesspool headed by Kerry.  Commonwealth case parallels Franklin case, cast of characters overlap, John Queen, Robert Kirchner, get fed contract to analyze Franklin Credit Union, Kopf legal counsel Commonwealth legislative committee, while Larry King out of town, Alisha Owen indicted, Kopf appointed federal judge.  Nov 4, 1988, FBI, National Fed Credit Union, shut down Franklin Credit, $40 mil missing, secret set of books, Sen. Ernie Chambers, and Sen. Loran Schmit main investigators, Schmit knew of King behaviors, King at Republican national conventions, Sen. Haberman said King was rising star, Maureen Reagan, parties, Schmit wanted probe of Franklin, legitimate investigation started, Chambers announced investigation into child abuse, sexual abuse, Stitt, Carlson, Williams presented evidence.  Senator Remmers, King common thread, Boystown, Stitt described coverup, received Walters report.  Wadman and Spire offer weak protest, Legislative Committee hired Jerry Lowe, Kirk Naylor, Special Counsel, detailed King's Nicaragua / CIA / White House connections, Wadman implicated.  investigation caution.  Caradori finds victims who would talk, videotaped, contained detailed allegations of sexual abuse, drug usage, pornography and other crimes by prominent Omaha citizens, including Larry King, Rusty Nelson, Deward Finch, but tapes became target of speculation, denunciation, rumor, doubt.  Alisha Owen cooperated, said involved, mentioned Alan Baer, Harold Andersen, Robert Waldman, she described flights to other states, testified on video tape, about 1983 Twin Towers events, Mark Powers, Alfie Allen, 14 yr old boys, Troy Boner, oral sex, fellatio, Gene Mahoney, Peter Citron, Kansas City, Pasadena, Los Angeles, private flights, Dixon and Dixon, Jackie Compton, Bob Kerry, Tom McKinney.  Caradori filed backup report, Troy Boner witness.  Schmit had tapes released, Dec 1989, Associated Press reported statements to be credible, but no move to prosecutions.  DeCamp public memo included prominent perpetrators.  DeCamp recommends Schmit go to FBI, regional head Nick O'Hara, who said Wadman was his closest personal friend, all unknown to DeCamp, O'Hara acted like investigating them.  Art Bell, Jim Bohannon, Caradori's tapes publicly surfaced, Omaha World Herald wrote articles to discredit witnesses, safety of witnesses a concern, Sen. Jerry Chizek chairman of Legislature's Judiciary Committee inquisitive, tight with Douglas County Sheriff Dick Roth, secret meeting, Judge Corrigan, DeCamp, auto body repair shop, focus on witness protection, Roth believed validity of tapes, said O'Hara - Wadman - FBI close, meeting resulted in no action. World Herald, pressure to repudiate.  Loretta Smith contacted DeCamp who said he believed her, Kathy Rutledge of the Lincoln Journal called DeCamp, threatening, John Goc, threatening DeCamp disbarment, ... then bar investigation of DeCamp, Open Phone America, World Herald Bob Dorr questions DeCamp about Franklin secret information, answered Dorr's questions in DeCamp memo, bar investigation terminated, Lincoln Journal corrected false first false story, DeCamp filed slander and defamation lawsuit against Journal, still in courts. Harold Andersen editor World Harold, most powerful and rich public personalities are central figures in Franklin investigation, truth is a defense in lawsuits, DeCamp memo causes firestorm statewide, Kansas City Star article.  Agreement for Citron to sue DeCamp,  then Citron charged with sex crimes with male minors, the victims poured out info, Citron pleaded guilty, World Herald still condemning DeCamp memo, suppressed Franklin and Commonwealth, State Security stories, 'The Portland Laugher, The Todd Cruz Caller, World Herald accused  Sen. Schmit for Legislative Franklin Committee leaks.  Robert Fenner of NCUA gave DeCamp details of Franklin secret accounts, DeCamp: "I believe he wanted-through me-to throw cold water on the questions that were heating up in Omaha, about the role of Franklin monies in the Iran-Contra money laundering schemes".  DeCamp shared this with Schmit. Paul Bonacci: 1990 Caradori discovered fourth victim witness, Bonacci, corrobated earlier tapes, victim of King, Baer, Citron, had some knowledge of Wadman, Harld Andersen, Judge Carlson, hundreds of 'trips' 15-20 to Washington D.C., other cities, OPD Mike Hoch might prosecute Bonacci.  Baer 'milk run' $20 for oral sex, threats on Bonacci's life, said probably Wadman who got Alisha Owen pregnant, Alan Baer 'scavenger hunts', bizarre sexual satanic disturbing stuff, Hunter Thompson.  Cover-up phase, Gary Caradori death, Douglas County grand jury convened July 1990, DeCamp memo, World Herald story "Grand Jury Says Abuse Stories 'Carefully Crafted Hoax'.  Grand Jury cleared Franklin of child abuse.  Never subpoenaed King, indicted Baer, Citron already had been indicted, indicted Owen and Bonacci, said Owen abused but not by the people and in the way she said.  Troy Boner and Danny King recanted, Nelly Webb gave more details on trips, Loretta Smith, said no evidence of connection to King, Andersen threats, rumormongers, hoax terms, Grand Jury says it's all hoax.  DeCamp, Schmit, Chambers, Casey came under attack from Grand Jury.  Karen Ormiston passed lie-detector tests about validity of Caradori tapes.  Caradori's evidence, Fuel records of planes that Owen, receipts, ignored by grand jury, tapes still exist.  KETV Channel 7 poll said 10-1 viewer dissatisfaction in grand jury report. Citron was World Herald society columnist, WH defended grand jury.  Grand Jury guided by prosecutor Samuel Van Pelt, and foreman Michael Flannigan.  Nebraska, worst laws on grand jury system. Nebraska Attorney General said these poor laws should exempt grand juries from responsibility of their errors.  amazing.  evidence of jury rigged, Lincoln Journal letter about Van Pelt cover-up of state police SWAT team death of farmer and political activist Arthur Kirk, World Herald defended Van Pelt.  Bonacci, Owen, and 'Jane Doe' charged that Van Pelt intimidated them into recanting their testimony, grand jury setup, told them how and what to say...Cosentino letter to Chambers, selective accusatorial questions, not looking for evidence, polish the text, King not called because he would 'plead the fifth'. Public outcry forced Douglas County prosecutor Ronald Staskiewicz appointed County Assistant Attorney Robert Sigler (Smiley) , continued the cover-up, two witnesses actually placed him in the Franklin case.  Scandal Scooper, The Water is Warmer 500 affiliates, Bonacci named Sigler as 'trip' participant. KAM air, Kansas City, Sioux City, Iowa, Joe Caniglia, Alan Baer, Robert Sigler.  Sigler was Charlie Rogers' (former Larry King lover) attorney, Rogers died of suicide, grand jury dismissed all this.  Bonacci  a big problem because he didn't recant. the grand jury had to call him a liar, but said he diagnosed with having mulitple personalities, but how can he be convicted of perjury? Dr. Berverly Mead hired, said he can't lie, just changes stories, and could tell truth depending on which personality he's in. Mead said Bonacci telling truth about sexual abuse at Southfork Ranch.  Westwood One, 40,000 interviews, and in Rosenthal questioins he was being truthful about abuse by Andersen, King, Baer and others.  Concerned Citizens for Responsible Government, investigated Kerry, Commonwealth Savings, State Security collapse, Ak Sar Ben, ConAgra CEO Mike Harper defended, Union Pacific Railroad chairman Michael Walsh, CEO Walter Scott of Peter Kiewit and Sons. Eugene Mahoney king of Ak Sar Ben 1991, investigated by Caradori. Washington connection, picture of King and Maureen Reagan, Southfork Ranch, July 5 1989 Washington Times Craig Spence, found dead in Boston hotel room 1989.  NAMBLA North American Man Boy Love Association, "sex before eight is too late" slogan, Bonacci testified being transported by NAMBLA, John Gosch Sr. hold poster of kidnapped son. Jill Cutshall, Norfold Nebraska kidnapped, Bonacci provided leads, Italian weekly Avvenimenti printed expose on Franklin Scandal, authors visited Nebraska 1991, Rev. James Bevel (MLK friend) led child abuse picket line 1991.  Omaha business community: Sen. Schmit warned investigation committee of rough road, Chambers represented black district of north Omaha, King not alone.  power structure, Bill Fitzgerald, Commercial Savings and Loan,  Ken Power of US West, Lyn Wallin Ziegenbein of Kiewit Foundation,  Harold Andersen all defended Larry King, despite warnings of Julie Walters Boystown social worker.  French Cafe, Sheila Calder (witness), partly owned by King, named a center of sexual abuse.  Ak Sar Ben (freemasonic social org centered on race track and fairgrounds in Omaha) closed ranks around Alan Baer, big Omaha company boards, same people, Mike Harper, ConAgra was king, 1990, pagan rituals.  ConAgra, Harper, board: Fitzgerald, Lauritzen, Rismiller, Scott, Kiewit, Skutt, Walsh, Yanney. poured millions into Franklin Credit Union, deposits contributions, supported King, advice, Consumer Services Organization, Barbara Moore employed by Sue Scott, Mutual of Omaha placed funds in Franklin.  Franklin small board: King, Webb, Hart Jr. named child abusers, Advisory Board: Andersen, Daub, Dodge II, Wallin, Kutak, Rock, Huie law firm, Thomas, Jamrog, Nesbitt, Hinton, Lamberty, Marvin, McAuley, Miller, Rothery, Wolforth, Zeilinger, Albert, Amato, Ambrose, Barker III, Bradford, Erickson, Healy.  Washington connection: Chamber,  Schmit, investigation would lead to highest levels of Republican party, Omaha biz community distances itself from King. King rising Republican star, but, heart attack, quintuple-bypass surgery, Don and Mike Show,  Feb 7 1990 King whisked away to fed psychiatric facility, to not embarrass Bush administration, or ask him for help.  Webb sister sexually exploited in Texas, Southfork, Bonacci at Southfork to provide sexual favors, DeCamp witnessed, backroom, Brazilian legation to the OAS, King contact Craig Spence, call boy ring, Spence night time tours of White House, Donald Gregg, CIA blackmail ops, Dream Boys, Man to Man,  Bodies by God.  Spence suicide said linked to Iran-Contra, World Herald said some Franklin money went to Contras.  James Allen Flannery, WH,  Stitt: CIA, FBI, homosexual financing, not Contras, S&L CIA financing of covert ops, Congress found out in investigation of failed S&L's, Houston Post, Pete Brewton, Amazon books 'The Mafia, CIA and George Bush', Silverado Savings & Loan, Neil Bush sat on board, allege dealt with Larry King, Oliver North, Tom Harvey, Mary Jane Harvey, Jamaica, Switzerland, Spain, Citizens for America, King bring North to Nebraska, CFA, David Carmen, Hugel, smoking was one of his trademarks, Council for Minority Americans, CIA, King sought ambassadorial appointment, Jamaica, Iran-Contra activities, North, multiple secret bank accounts, Credit Suisse, National Endowment for Democracy, Violeta Chamorro, You're Have a Heart Attack, Nicaragua elections, George Bush at King's party, 'people have been dying', World Herald discredits story, Nelly Patterson Webb, 1986, told Julie Walters, Washington, Chicago, Brent, Brandt Thomas - Boystown resident who moved in with LK, Bush, Chicago party, Brandt, Sorenon told Vlahoulis that both Kimberly and Nelly brought up the name of George Bush and indicated that they had both met him. Ronald Roskens, Roskins, AID, fired as chancellor of UofN (sexual activities), King member of 'chancellor's advisory committee', Bush letter of praise, Harold Andersen, Hill & Knowlton and Harold Andersen, Robert Keith Gray, CEO, Reagan campaign, expert CIA homosexual blackmail ops.  221
• BushBlowJob "WASHINGTON -- Photographer Russell E. "Rusty" Nelson was recently arrested two days after journalist Hunter Thompson reportedly committed suicide four weeks ago on February 10, according to two phone interviews with attorney John DeCamp last week.  Nelson was allegedly employed by a former Republican Party activist to take pictures of current or retired U.S. House-Senate members and other prominent government officials engaging in sexual criminality by receiving or committing sodomy and other sex acts on children during the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations.  Hunter Thompson’s death and the news blackout of Rusty Nelson’s simultaneous arrest raise questions that someone may be attempting to limit Nelson’s freedom or threaten him, since according to testimony, both men had allegedly witnessed homosexual prostitution and pedophile criminal acts in a suppressed but far-reaching child sex-ring probe closely linked to Senate and House members--but also former President George H. W. Bush.
• Catholic priest previously convicted of child molestation has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two teenage brothers in the 1990s.  Louis Rogge, 76, of Joliet pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse.
• Yahoo  Police smashed a global Internet pedophile ring, rescuing 31 children and rounding up more than 700 suspects worldwide ... Some 200 suspects are based in Britain, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center said. The ring was traced to an Internet chat room called "Kids the Light of Our Lives" that featured images of children being subjected to horrific sexual abuse.  The investigation involves agencies from 35 countries and lasted 10 months.  The host of the Web site, Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, of Buxhall, who used the online identity "Son of God," admitted to nine counts of possessing and distributing indecent images, authorities said
• Nebraska sodomy laws: Protection... from the sexual depravity of moral perverts is as essential as the protection of human life from the homicidal tendency of assassins.  Common Law of England, sodomy a capital offense, life imprisonment, but... fellatio not a crime against nature, and did not violate sodomy law.  Carnal copulation prohibited, but law didn't cover cunninlingus, needed 'fixing'.   

A slow Tom Corbett throws Joe Paterno under the bus

'It's going to kill him'

"What counts in sports is not the victory, but the magnificence of the struggle," Penn State Coach Joe Paterno for years was fond of saying. It's a variation of the phrase, "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game."

This ethos of fair play, honesty, doing the right thing, abiding by the same rules as everyone else, hard work, proper preparation, and decency in all our endeavors is lost on Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett.

Insiders at the state attorney general's office speak of moral bankruptcy, blatant hypocrisy and raw politics in the AG's office under Corbett.

Tom Corbett misused the office of attorney general to win the Pennsylvania governor's office at any and all cost, by any means necessary, those around him say. Part of the great cost paid, we now see in the Jerry Sandusky case, included the safety, dignity and well-being of children.

Required homework for understanding the Sandusky case:

'Don't do it here'

'Get used to having your mind boggled'

Winning frends and influencing voters

'Tied together'

Political prosecutions race forward while pedophile case stalls

source:   yardbird.com

'Arrest by news conference'

'Tom didn't want to do it'

Candidate Corbett orders background investigation of 356 potential 'Bonusgate' jurors

Poor ethics create more problems in the AG's office

Bonus for 'Bonusgate' prosecutor?

A laughable punch line: 'I'm referring this matter to Attorney General Tom Corbett'

Not the good shepherd

'The whole office was political'

'Kissing the ring'

The writing on the wall

Whither Ray?

Corbett avoids assigning Sandusky case to AG's Child Predator Unit: 'Could have done a quick grand jury in two months time'

A moveable scandal: Gov-elect Corbett removed as obstacle, AG office nabs Sandusky in several months' time

JoePa takes the fall for TomCo

What this is called

source:   yardbird.com

As governor, Corbett then attempted to distract public attention away from his own mounting failures, political machinations and dishonesties by making a fall guy of Joe Paterno.

Tom Corbett's lack of sense of decency or character, his fundamental dishonesty, and basic incompetence were magnified by the political nature of the elected attorney general's office. This gives cause to pose plenty of troubling questions about the stalled legal case against Jerry Sandusky.

Look at the wreckage in Corbett's wake. The reputations of Coach Joe Paterno, Penn State, and its football program, are all in tatters and ruin. Like a scandalized widow, Penn State would contemplate changing its name. Penn State's once-proud football team, for decades among the finest in the nation, suffered a fall from grace, deep disgrace, and was in jeopardy disbandment.

The moral authority and integrity of the governor's office and its predecessor -- once occupied by great, sincere and hard-working men like Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Curtin, and Gifford Pinchot -- has also taken a devastating hit.

Pennsylvania and some of its most hallowed institutions would be discredited and become the butt of national jokes and disbelief. All that has been much discussed.

Not so clearly seen and spoken about is that Corbett, on his political run to the governor's office, would leave in tatters the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, and potentially the careers and reputations of the many good and dedicated people who work there.

But that's only part of the unseen story.

'Don't do it here'

Jerry Sandusky's kid glove treatment at the hands of diverse Pennsylvania institutions, from 1998 until late 2010, reveals a classic pattern of looking the other way. From at least 2009 onward, AG Tom Corbett would be the lead player in this culture of cover-up, shielding and confidentiality.

In March 2009, a former Corbett underling, Centre County District Attorney Michael Madeira, referred several Sandusky pedophile complaints to AG Corbett. Madeira was a former deputy AG, and a drug prosecutor, under Corbett. He'd been elected Centre County DA following the strange disappearance of Ray Gricar in 2005. Passing the case along to AG Corbett, Madeira cited a personal conflict of interest with a relative.

DA Madeira himself hadn't done much with these Sandusky complaints while they were in his office. The complaints, after all, had been referred to Madeira the previous year, in 2008. Neither would AG Corbett do much with them.

After the Sandusky scandal became public, speculation arose as to possible motivations behind Corbett's reluctance to take action. His concern that he'd be perceived as having impeded or obstructed the investigation. His fear of offending major contributors. Fear of backlash from alumni and friends of Penn State.

While certainly there are issues of politics, largesse (Marcellus Shale, for example) and patronage deserving keen public scrutiny to help explain Corbett's misconduct, we must consider an obvious harsh reality:

Sandusky's protection by Corbett, and others, mirrors a pattern that is all too familiar to those who've investigated or studied other long-running pedophile crimes, I've been told repeatedly by experts.

Sandusky's treatment by superiors at PSU and the law enforcement community in Pennsylvania is little different from that received by Catholic priests in this and other countries. This familiar pattern of non-investigation -- amounting to shielding and protection -- would later scandalize the Roman Catholic Church.

Pedophile priests for years would simply be told to go to a different town and parish.

"Just don't do it here," became the bottom line. Like it or not, culturally and socially, for decades, this is how pedophile cases curiously have been handled by church and state authority figures alike, here and abroad.

This happened with Jerry Sandusky. Complaints from victims and their families would be given lip service by school officials, charity overseers, and law enforcement -- including Attorney General Tom Corbett. Any complaints filed, and any supposed investigations, would be allowed to languish in the dark for years. And Sandusky would remain free to carry on.

Jerry Sandusky would simply be told, again and again: Don't do it here. Don't do it in the shower room. Don't do it at Penn State.

The current pope, Benedict XVI, was himself notably engulfed in very similar church pedophile cover-up scandals. Before he became pope, as a cardinal, Benedict took referrals and complaints of pedophilia from his subordinate church officials. These referrals simply and clearly were not acted upon in a timely, responsible fashion, or any fashion at all.

It comes down to a matter of priorities. Protecting an entrenched institution, its reputation and that of its members -- and protecting its God Almighty cash flow -- become more important than protecting children.

"The abuse cases of two priests in Arizona have cast further doubt on the Catholic church's insistence that Pope Benedict XVI played no role in shielding pedophiles before he became pope," the Associated Press, for example, found in April 2010.

"Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Ariz., then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.

"In another Tucson case, that of Msgr. Robert Trupia, the bishop wrote to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005. Bishop Manuel Moreno called Trupia 'a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he many have contact with.' There is no indication in the case files that Cardinal Ratzinger even responded.

"The details of the two cases come as other allegations emerge that Benedict – as a Vatican cardinal – was part of a culture of cover-up and confidentiality."

Msgr. Robert Trupia (top) and Jerry Sandusky: both enjoyed a long-running culture of cover-up and shielding

And so it was with Pennsylvania Attorney General Corbett's shielding and protecting former assistant Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, Penn State, and the formerly well-respected Second Mile charity.

The assistant football coach would receive a similar hands-off treatment for more than a decade, not only from his overseers at Penn State, and his associates at The Second Mile charity, but also from the District Attorney's office in Centre County, and, central to this essay, from the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, occupied since 2005 by Tom Corbett.

Corbett, like the Pope, would become the most visible and prominent part of a culture of cover-up and confidentiality, shielding and protection of an alleged predator.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that Corbett, Paterno, and many of the other players in this tragedy were, like myself, raised Catholic. A weak defense would be that they were merely following the example of the earthly leader of the church, the Pontiff.

The founder of the church, Jesus of Nazareth, had a decidedly different view about the treatment of children. We're told that Jesus loved the little children, and spoke of their innocence and purity as a parable of the Kingdom of God. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all relate this story:

"And they brought young children to him ... and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God'... And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them." see Mark 10:13-16, Matthew 19:14, Luke 18:15-17.

Much like those questionable disciples, AG Corbett would keep the children from the supposed safe harbor and long arms of the law.

There would be an investigation of Sandusky in name only, and opportunities to prosecute Sandusky for pedophilia would be avoided time and again.

It would come down to matters of priorities and political expediencies, Corbett's associates say.

Corbett, for his part, has doubtfully explained his failure to prosecute Sandusky. It was the fault of a "slow grand jury," Corbett explains. Very slow indeed.

source:   yardbird.com

He would say he wanted to make sure there was enough evidence before bringing a case. But he did little to collect more evidence, and stymied the investigation. Corbett in fact did next to nothing from early 2009 onward, when the Centre County DA Michael Madeira referred the case to him. It was Tom who was slow.

Corbett adds that he was focusing his attentions instead on a long-running public corruption case known in Pennsylvania as "Bonusgate." That, observers say, is somewhat closer to the truth.

But it's not really the whole truth. The whole story is far more complex and troubling.

The whole story is, in fact, mind-boggling.

'Get used to having your mind boggled'

As quantum luck and chance would have it, in December 2011, as I sat working on this essay, Pennsylvania's Terry Gross, on her Philadelphia-based radio show Fresh Air, hosted astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, of U.C. Berkeley.

Prof. Perlmutter had just won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He spoke animatedly and in some detail with Gross about his work, concerning the red shift of light from supernovae, and other mind-bending matters of relativity and the universe.

Interviewer Gross admitted that her mind was boggled by Perlmutter's work. Nothing, on close examination, was as it seemed it should be.

Laureate Professor Perlmutter laughed. Such is the nature of our everyday universe, he explained.

"What's odd about this whole game is that you have to get used to having your mind boggled," he tells Terry Gross. "Left and right."

And so it is, I thought, in recent years with Pennsylvania politics, and our troubled state attorney general's office. Pennsylvanians of late have been rocked by one mind-bending systemic public corruption scandal after another. We've grown used to having our minds boggled, left and right.

More than 6,500 children in Luzerne County, PA, were sold down the river to private detention facility owners who for years bribed state judges with $2.6 million to house the lodgers. Close relatives of state Supreme Court justices were caught up in this and other Dickensian criminal capers. The state's chief justice himself in 2011 was caught funneling millions of dollars allocated for a Philadelphia family court construction project to a close associate and golf buddy. A state Supreme Court justice was impeached. As I write, another state Supreme Court justice has been informed that she is the target of yet another grand jury investigation. A state attorney general in the 1990s was convicted of taking bribes for years from organized crime and gambling figures. A powerful state senator for decades openly used political patronage and extortion to feather his private nest.

Complaints of many of these crimes were received in several state offices, but simply were ignored for years, like the Sandusky complaints. Time and again in Pennsylvania government, powerful insiders are protected from investigation while victimized citizens have nowhere to go with their complaints. Thus powerless victims are further victimized. At this party the band always plays on.

In each case, these scandals festered for years without the intervention of the state AG's office. It was only the tardy involvement of federal investigators that finally brought some of these crimes to public view.

The inability of victimized Pennsylvanians to get help, or to simply be heard with their complaints, is at the heart of the overall problem. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania no longer has a government, or a press, that is much, if it all, interested in all of its citizens. Rather, privileged insiders (like Jerry Sandusky) have become all-important, and take precedence. It has become the Privilegedwealth of Pennsylvania.

How did we get here?

A lot of this, to paraphrase Terry Gross, simply is not as it should be. To understand the decades-running Sandusky story you have to be prepared to go from one mind-boggling event to another.

The bottom line is that Tom Corbett's personal misuse of the state AG's office to run for governor all but destroyed the morale and integrity of the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General. Previous to 1980 the AG was an appointed position. Elective politics have proven to be poison for the AG's office.

Most ironically, the staff of the AG's office has been left as helpless as the victims. No one working in the state AG's office seems to know where to turn for help, or how to explain to the public the deep problems.

"It's all politics," with a sigh, is how I've heard described what's going on.

Winning friends and influencing voters

To understand what's going on in Pennsylvania, as well as Tom Corbett's claims that a "slow grand jury" was responsible for his failure to act promptly to prosecute Jerry Sandusky, we have to attempt to wrap our minds around what in Pennsylvania has come to be called Corbett's "Bonusgate" prosecutions.

Many Pennsylvania Democrats, independents and even old-time, fair-minded Republicans simply call it political persecution. But it's more worrisome than that.

The "Bonusgate" case began in January 2007, a little more than two years before the Sandusky case was referred to AG Corbett.

It started with an article appearing in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. The Patriot is the capital city's daily newspaper, with roots into the mid-19th century. Today the Patriot is Harrisburg's only daily newspaper, and in modern times is owned by the Newhouse chain.

On January 27, 2007, the Patriot-News ran an article reporting that some unnamed Democrats working in the lower house of the legislature -- called in Pennsylvania the General Assembly, or simply the House -- received bonuses in their paychecks. What wasn't so clear was why they'd received the salary bonuses.

High horse, low standards of self-examination: the Harrisburg Patriot-News says we must 'do what is right.' When they figure out what that is, they'll ask Tom Corbett to investigate ...

The previous election cycle in 2006 brought the Democrats to a narrow 102 to 101 majority in the General Assembly, the Patriot-News pointed out.

Not everyone got the mysterious bonus in his or her paycheck.

"What was clear is the payments have stung some caucus employees who were left out, and raised questions for them about whether the payments were tied to work on legislative campaigns," the Patriot's Charles Thompson and Jan Murphy wrote.

The Patriot only mentioned names of prominent Democrat leaders. "Employees contacted by The Patriot-News who did not take campaign assignments this fall from (House Majority Leader Bill) DeWeese, former Democratic Whip Mike Veon, D-Beaver, or the House Democratic Campaign Committee said they did not receive a bonus. They spoke to the newspaper only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue," the Patriot states.

It's against the law, the Patriot reminded us, for state workers to be paid for political activities.

"It is a longstanding practice for many legislative staffers from both parties to take leave, compensatory or personal time to do volunteer work on campaigns," the Patriot reported. "It would be illegal, however, for their employers to pay them for that work with state funds."

In the old days, when Pennsylvania enjoyed a robust, independent, and critically thinking press, the editorial team at a daily newspaper like the Patriot would have naturally hoped that an article like this would spark the interest of some independent-minded government investigator. Perhaps the article's concerns would be picked up, investigated, and championed by someone in neutral law enforcement, or the legislature.

Before the fall of newspapers and the rise of the Internet, to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, for example, one's story usually had to be acted upon by some attorney general, district attorney, or legislative committee.

The Patriot clearly wished its story would be pursued by Attorney General Tom Corbett, for whom the paper even today often acts as chief cheerleader and defender.

The newspaper's editors got their wish. Within days, in February 2007, AG Corbett announced that his public corruption unit would "look into" the Patriot's suggestion that the legislative staff bonuses were tied to campaign work.

(Since the time of Corbett's election as attorney general in 2004, the Patriot would be about the only state publication that I'm aware of that would be successful in getting AG Corbett to investigate anything.)

For Corbett, in 2007 already contemplating his run for governor in 2010, the Patriot's article proved irresistible. The Patriot had a large, captive audience in Republican-sodden central Pennsylvania. And, after all, the Patriot's article mentioned only problems in the opposition Democratic caucus.

Fair enough, I suppose. Here was a story of interest, involving political work at the state capitol. And here was an elected Republican attorney general saying he'd look into it.

Trouble is, to say you've found politics in the state capital building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a lot like saying you've found a turd in a sewage treatment plant.

That's where you find it.

Taking the fall in colonial Pennsylvania: detail of floor tile in Harrisburg state capitol building, by Henry Chapman Mercer (click here to enlarge photo)

Operatives of both political parties at the capitol continuously practice elective politics. Legislative workers engaging in politics are as common as oil paintings and colored floor tiles in the rotunda.

Elective politics and politicians built the place, like cowboys built the rodeo, and clowns built the circus. It is the music they dance to. It is the bounce in their step. The twinkle in their eye. The slap on their backs. It is the blood in their veins, and the drop of vermouth in their gin. And everyone knows it.

Both political parties in both houses of the legislature are guilty of these time-honored political practices. Throughout the state's history, legislative workers and their political bosses have engaged in opposition research; combing through nominating petitions for errors or fraud; disqualifications of nettlesome candidates; organizing the troops back home; strategizing; criticizing; cursing; pushing a partisan agenda; seeking a job and hiring a worker.

Most if not all come to work with some election or other on their minds. The Harrisburg Patriot-News itself timidly waited a good while to acknowledge this reality. It seemed instead to attempt to lay blame by degrees.

"Corbett, a Republican, has vowed to examine all four legislative caucuses," the newspaper reported on December 28, 2007, at the end of the first year of fear, loathing and hair-splitting. "But the probe has focused most publicly on House Democrats, whose bonus payments surged from $400,000 in 2005 to more than $1.8 million in 2006.

"House and Senate GOP staffers, by comparison, were paid bonuses totaling less than $500,000." Almost immediately, at the start of this witch-hunt in 2007, cries of foul went up from the Democratic caucus. Democrats complained that a partisan, elected Republican attorney general, obviously coveting the governor's office, should not be allowed to conduct this overtly political investigation. Why not appoint a special prosecutor? Failing that, shouldn't Corbett rule out running for governor?

Heedless, as always, of common sense warnings, Tom Corbett cynically proceeded to use an investigation about politics in state offices to launch his own political campaign for governor.

To win votes, Corbett would prosecute others who, he'd argue in court papers, should be jailed for doing what he was now doing: Using his office, its resources and its workers to get him elected to higher office.

Other problems became manifest. It was equally obvious that AG Corbett could not blaze a trail to the governor's office, and win friends and influence voters, if he launched the torpedoes at his own party's powerful legislative leadership caucuses, and their political supporters in the capitol, and back home.

So, naturally, it should go without saying (but I'll say it anyway), prominent Republicans would have to be protected and shielded, even while AG Corbett's political enemies in the legislature's Democratic caucus went down with a thud. The Patriot-News seemed to have had a tin ear to any complaints. The newspaper continued to push its story. It even seemed to be championing its champion, Tom Corbett, for the governor's desk.

In Pennsylvania, backed by the deep pockets of the Newhouse clan, the Patriot was starting to look like the last dinosaur standing. The Patriot seemed suddenly powerful, at least compared to its tottering daily news counterparts in cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and nearby York, which were all threatening to go, or had already gone, belly up.

Already, in 2007, the unholy legislative bonus affair had been called by some unimaginative wag in a newsroom somewhere "Bonusgate."

'Tied together' In November 2011, ironically, the Patriot would critically report in a headline that the fates of Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile charity, and Penn State University, "were tied together."

Just as accurately, the Patriot and Tom Corbett became tied together in the ongoing "Bonusgate" political fiasco. They would remain tied together, by necessity, in the Sandusky/PSU fiasco.

source:   yardbird.com

Tied together: in the 1958 film The Defiant Ones, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier portray a Pennsylvania governor and a newspaper editor on the run from reality, waste deep in The Big Muddy. 'The big fool says to 'push on''

The Patriot-News had become joined at the hip with AG Tom Corbett, if not intentionally, certainly practically, and obviously. Bound together, like two escapees from a chain gang, they found themselves waist deep in The Big Muddy.

A good bit of this binding together included what we call today "access to power," or "access journalism." We kiss ass, we get access. We don't kiss ass, we lose access. So we better continue to kiss Tom's ass. This carries over today with the Patriot's coverage of the Sandusky case, its fawning portrayal of Corbett's continued bad acts in the mess, and the paper's careless role in the rush to judgment against Coach Joe Paterno.

In this lamentable age of monopoly newspapers, a dangerous dynamic formed between the politically ambitious Republican attorney general and the Republican-leaning Patriot-News.

Too much power had been allowed to concentrate in too few places. It would end up destroying the state attorney general's office. It would end up, ironically, contributing to the languishing non-investigation of Jerry Sandusky.

It may yet destroy Gov. Tom Corbett. The Patriot, as far back as 2007, chose to report this growing controversy concerning Tom Corbett's political misuse of the attorney general's office, if it chose to report about it at all, as a problem of mere perception.

In the same December 2007 article mentioned above, the Patriot even published quotes suggesting that Corbett should somehow be perceived as a "corruption-busting" reformer. With this unhealthy concentration of power, a sort of Orwellian Newspeak was being born in Pennsylvania. Machine politicians abusing their offices were reformers. Bad was good. Up was down. Dissenting opinion was whining, and perhaps even criminal. A dangerous political game, based on unbridled access to unchecked power, was unfolding.

Playing to this perception game, Republican lawmakers were even allowed to wonder aloud in this article if they might be the next to be sacrificed. Forget facts, the law, fairness, and what's best for Pennsylvania's future.

"Republican leaders, meanwhile, fear Corbett might feel it necessary to take a GOP scalp to immunize himself against bias charges," the Patriot reported.

And, "It really does ramp up his need to show the investigation was broad and the net was cast wide to show this was not a partisan crusade, but him (Corbett) doing his job as the chief law enforcement officer in the commonwealth," a political science teacher was even allowed to opine about these perceptions.

All this, you'll note, does not concern whether Tom Corbett was actually doing the right thing. It only concerns whether the public would perceive AG Corbett was doing the right thing.

There is a difference between the two.

What was missing from the Patriot's non-critical and shallow self-examination was a serious critique of growing and obvious structural problems in Pennsylvania government. Also missing was a soul-searching look at our politics, and how, and whether, our system of politics should be changed.

'What was missing from the Patriot-News' shallow coverage was a soul-searching self-examination of its proper role as a publisher, and the proper role of writers in our American society'

The ignored abstract questions include: Should the state attorney general be elected? Should an elected attorney general, in the midst of a political corruption investigation, be allowed to run for governor? Should there be a period of time -- say, four to eight years -- when an attorney general is disqualified by law from running for governor? Wouldn't an independent prosecutor better and more fairly handle this investigation?

But there are harder abstract questions. How does our political system really work? Is there a reason it works like this? What are the alternatives? Will those untried alternatives actually work? For example, we've heard calls for term limitations of elected officials. But recent events in Washington show us the dangers of running a government of amateurs, musicians, soap opera stars, carnival barkers and political science professors. Do we really want to outlaw those old-time smoothie political horse traders and arm twisters who know their way around a capitol? Do we really want to end earmarks? How can a congressman, a senator, or a president horse trade with nothing? WWLJS: What Would Lyndon Johnson Say?

In politics, to the victor go the spoils. When there are no spoils, what will be the carrots and sticks to move the horse and wagon, to get things done around the common weal?

The Patriot as well ignored a soul-searching self-examination of its proper role as a publisher, and the proper role of its writers in our American society.

Should a newspaper merely be a one-sided cheerleader for a politician or a prosecutor? Should a newspaper, or a writer, be about throwing light, or throwing people in jail?

Should a writer, a publication, or a blog, attempt to illuminate what's going on, to seek fairness, to ask questions about how our government functions, and suggest alternatives?

Political prosecutions race forward while pedophile case stalls Former House Democrat Majority Whip Mike Veon was among the first to go down in a "Bonusgate" conviction, in March 2010. Veon's conviction came just as primary voters were being asked to vote for Tom Corbett in the gubernatorial primary.

As strange luck would have it, in late 2009, I stopped into a Harrisburg convenience store and spotted, standing in line, waiting to check out, Mike Veon. I recognized him from his perp walk photos in the Patriot-News. His neatly trimmed moustache and beard made him hard to misidentify. We struck up a conversation. He was aware of some of my writings, and some of my family. We agreed to meet and talk.

Democrats Mike Veon (top) and Bill DeWeese: they say Corbett and his cronies do the same things but no one will investigate ....

Some days later Veon and I met again, this time in a small, out-of-the way tavern in midtown Harrisburg. Veon was well groomed and dapper, as always.

We sat at a table drinking a few beers. Several appreciative and concerned patrons came up to shake Veon's hand, and to wish him well at his coming trial. A city alderman or a committeeman came up to discuss some small neighborhood political problem. Veon was like a pol from the past, I saw. Ear to the rail, hand in the hand, eye to the eye.

I'd visit Veon several more times at his home in Harrisburg. We sat out on his small shady back patio, listening to the traffic go by out front, on Second Street. You could almost smell and hear the muddy Susquehanna River flowing a block and a half away.

I didn't ask Mike Veon much anything at all of "Bonusgate." I really wasn't much interested in it. I told him I'd like to interview him in depth about how the legislative process really worked, and any reforms he'd suggest.

My questions appeared strange to him, I could tell. It was as if I was speaking a foreign tongue in a foreign land. He spoke a little about the days when he first came to Harrisburg as a young lawmaker, about the blatant politicking he'd witnessed in those days in places like the offices of politicos such as Jim Manderino. Manderino was a beefy old-time legislative leader in the 1970s and 80s. The public won't read these insightful and humorous stories in the pages of the Patriot-News. Veon also spoke lovingly of his wife, and the long hours he'd put in at the state capitol, often sleeping on his office couch to get things done.

"If I had to do it all over," he tells me at one point, looking me dead in the eye, "I wish I would've just spent the time with my wife."

Then, a flash in his eye, he spoke of his deep loyalty to the Democratic Party, and his blind trust in other Democrats.

In a few months' time, following a rock'em sock'em trial before a Republican judge (who himself was a former partisan DA), Veon would be convicted in "Bonusgate."

He'd be sentenced to state prison for six to fourteen years.

Then, just as unexpectedly, as luck would further have it, in January 2012, as I sat writing this essay, my phone rang. On the other end was Mike Veon's one-time boss, former Majority Leader Bill DeWeese. Rep. DeWeese rang me to complain about his own pending "Bonusgate" trial, and to offer up a few choice words for former prosecutor and Gov. Tom Corbett.

"Corbett and the people around him are brutish, nasty, and are just bad people," DeWeese says to me. He compares today's Pennsylvania to Bavaria Germany in the 1920s. Everyone marching in lockstep.

DeWeese complained to me of blatant politicking by Corbett's own staffers during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, and the inability of anyone to do anything about it.

DeWeese doesn't complain to only me, I should add. He gets on the floor of the state House and blows loud and long about it, like a solo trumpeter.

A week later, on his way to jury selection on January 19, DeWeese pointed out to reporters that AG Corbett, from March 2009 to October 2010, "had 14 prosecutors and agents tearing my life and Sharon Rodavich's life apart. He had one investigator on Jerry Sandusky." Rodavich was a former staffer of, and co-defendant with, DeWeese, before she accepted a plea deal. But DeWeese is overly generous about the number of investigators assigned to the Sandusky non-investigation. It's apparent that the "one investigator," a state trooper, assigned to Sandusky's pedophile case, wasn't even actively investigating. The trooper was resigned to occasionally flipping through a dusty copy of Sandusky's book, Touched, that was stashed at his desk -- when he wasn't working on other cases.

His is a "political trial," DeWeese complains, brought over "petty" matters by his political opponent, AG and now Gov. Corbett. "Corbett had it out for me. He's had a focus on me for a long time," DeWeese tells reporters. Already, in opposition quarters, believe it or not, I've heard talk by some of seeking political asylum outside of Pennsylvania. That's a measure of how bad and dangerous politics have become here.

As for me, I was glad to lend an ear to Bill DeWeese's complaints.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News certainly wouldn't be listening, or looking, or speaking out much on DeWeese's behalf, or his calls for fairness.

The other side of the story wasn't all that was not being told. A growing number of hard questions about Tom Corbett's personal misconduct were, and continue to be, ignored by the Patriot-News, and other corporate media.

What about the hypocrisy of Corbett using his AG's staff and resources for political ends?

Just how far did these political and prosecutorial abuses go? As the Romans used to say in their final days of Praetorian Guard corruption, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "Who will guard the guardians themselves?"

'The AG's office would be converted into a political machine for Tom Corbett'

Who would call Tom Corbett on it? He'd thrown some of his most articulate political opponents of the Democratic caucus leadership in jail, some for draconian sentences. He was threatening other Democrats with the same. If they were to speak out, they would only be threatened with harsher sentences, for being "uncontrite." Apparently his political opponents were supposed to be contrite and sorrowful that they were not members of Corbett's own protected Republican caucus.

So everyone mostly shut up and went along. There were no opposition newspapers left to speak out against what critics say was, and is, going on in Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania, unfortunately, in the last decade, powers increasingly coalesced to one man and one party -- including the great power to throw personal or political opponents in jail. Dissenting voices found themselves drowned out, ignored, or threatened into silence.

The bare bodkin we should consider, for the purpose of this essay, is the effect all this had -- not just on victimized children and others -- but on the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.

The AG's office would be converted into a political machine for Tom Corbett. The AG's office would be transformed from a respectable and independent law enforcement agency into an election-day power base.

Hidden somewhere in the bowels of that in-all-but-name political election machine was a pedophile complaint mentioning Jerry Sandusky and a few of his long-suffering young victims.

'Arrest by news conference'

The farcical yet ultimately tragic canard that the Jerry Sandusky pedophile investigation languished in the AG's office for almost two years because it was before "a slow grand jury" is a disingenuous and ridiculous lie, associates of Tom Corbett say.

The sad truth is it was before a slow attorney general who was running for governor.

Arrest by news conference: AG office staff say perp walk photos like these, published by the Patriot-News, were a calculated part of AG Tom Corbett's campaign for governor. Top photos show 'Bonusgate' defendants Rachael Manzo (being escorted by AG office agents) and Al Bowman. The bottom photo of Joe and Sue Paterno, thrown to the wolves in sudden disgrace, was placed in heavy rotation by the Patriot in its pages and on its website shortly before JoePa's death. It would not be the Patriot's finest moment.

The reality is that, since 2007, a large percentage of grand juror time was devoted exclusively to "Bonusgate." In Tom Corbett's election playbook and timetable, there would be little grand jury time for anything else, including sodomized children.

One way to look at it is as a simple matter of priorities.

source:   yardbird.comsource:   yardbird.com

It was explained to me like this: There are only two statewide grand juries meeting at any time. And those two grand juries do not meet over the summer months, between May to September. When they do meet, it is only part time, most often only for several hours a week.

Grand juries are furthermore disbanded after 18 months, when a new set of grand jurors must be sworn in to restart an investigation, basically from scratch. In other words, even the most earnest grand jurors have very limited resources of time. They may indict a ham sandwich, but they must do it like a short order cook: fast and greasy.

From 2007 to 2010, the grand juries were almost completely saturated by witnesses and evidence involving Corbett's "Bonusgate" legislative bonus prosecutions.

During this period Tom Corbett was also running for governor, basing his campaign on the controversial theory that he was a "Bonusgate reformer." So there had to be, if only for purely political reasons, "Bonusgate" results.

There was little time for anything else but "Bonusgate," save drug prosecutions, which also made Tom Corbett -- or any present-day prosecutor -- look good to voters.

These "Bonusgate" grand jury sessions were scheduled purely to "Get Tom elected governor," I've been told. Most everyone in the AG's office knew this, but could not openly say it in order to protect their jobs, and their careers in Pennsylvania law enforcement.

Instead, Orwellian-like Newspeak began to spill from the tongues of the AG staff.

Phrases like, "We're going to make another arrest by news conference today," were commonly heard.

"Arrest by news conference," became a popular AG's office euphemism. Rather than simply arresting someone and quietly having the suspect arraigned, the front office insisted on first scheduling a news conference with TV and newspaper crews present for a well-publicized "perp walk." This was all done to make Corbett look good on TV and in the papers for election purposes. It is possible, after all, to arrest someone without a perp walk, and without news cameras in attendance.

The office of attorney general would de-evolve, hand-in-hand with the Patriot-News, into a press office for the elevation of Tom Corbett to the governor's office. It was a lot like the 1957 movie The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis: the preening press agent, the powerful, ill-tempered and mercurial Zeus who destroys with a bolt from his finger, and, thrown in for good measure, more than a dash of incestuous relations.

For offenders already in jail, but charged with additional crimes, "arrest by news conference" became an obvious joke. Rather than simply handing the new arrest warrant to the prisoner already behind bars and arraigning him quietly, the unlucky prisoner, by order of Corbett's front office, would now be driven to some judicial office for a perp walk and a specially scheduled "arrest by news conference." Only then would the jailbird be given his new arrest papers, and driven back to jail.

Did AG office employees know they were helping Tom Corbett get elected governor?

In 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis returns, this time as the preening Pennsylvania press agent played against Burt Lancaster's attorney-general-cum-governor role. Here they destroy a senator for lunch, send his widow flowers, make a call to the Penn State Board of Trustees, then track down Burt's sister for dinner...

"Hell yeah," I'm told.

"It was all political, and everyone knew it," is also how I've heard these and other practices described.

"Everyone in the AG's office knew they were working to get Corbett elected governor with 'Bonusgate,' and with everything else they were told to do."

It was the truth that everyone knew, but no one could speak.

The sad twist of irony is that, in late 2011, the Harrisburg Patriot-News decried the two years the Sandusky case had languished in the AG's office.

The complaint I've heard is that it was the Patriot's own self-serving chest-thumping about the "Bonusgate" donnybrook that ate up an overwhelming chunk of the finite resources of the state AG's office, and the limited time of the grand jurors.

The political AG's office had become media driven.

This is where the media drove it.

'Tom didn't want to do it'

Moreover, a limited number of deputy attorneys general are on staff to handle cases like Jerry Sandusky's pedophile investigation. The deputy AGs are the lawyers who, at the ultimate direction of the AG, actually prepare and oversee the cases, and take them to court.

Without an activated deputy AG pushing a case, and without the approval of the boss, the attorney general, even the most diligent state trooper or agent can go nowhere with a prosecution. A cop cannot take a case to court without a lawyer.

The lack of prosecutor availability and oversight can also be seen as a method by which the AG's front office came to control, slow, or otherwise obstruct a hot-potato case involving even the most diligent state trooper or AG's office agent.

In the old days, agents and troopers ran the cases. They would consult with the deputy AGs mostly for matters like legal advice and warrants. For the most part, back then, investigators were in the driver's seat. They'd file charges, and the AG's office would follow through.

In 2003 all that changed. A new policy for criminal investigations required agents and troopers to consult closely with a deputy AG for what was called the direction, scope and flow of a case.

Simply put, if a deputy AG was not allowed by superiors to push a case, or did not approve of its "direction, scope or flow," the case would go nowhere, no matter how many cops or investigators were put on the job.

'The political AG's office had become media driven.

This is where the media drove it'

As I say, an investigator or a cop can't bring a case to court. That's the job of a lawyer. That was the job of Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett.

Look at the AG as a shepherd, or a traffic cop, if you're so inclined. Without his say so, no one goes.

The attorney general's ultimate role is to establish priorities, allocate resources, and shepherd cases to court. Without a good shepherd, the sheep are lost.

The attorney general himself seldom personally takes a case to court. (Although former AG Mike Fisher, as a rarity, did in the early 2000s personally plead a few cases in court on behalf of the commonwealth.) Instead, the AG, through his criminal and civil department heads, assigns cases to deputy AGs.

AG Corbett's job and public trust to the people in the Sandusky case was to assign priorities and resources to the deputy AG to ensure the job was done. That's precisely what Corbett did not do, and where Corbett fell down on the job.

As we see here, a politically elected attorney general let loose to plague society can easily misuse his public trust to control a political and social hot potato. That's what happened to the AG's Sandusky pedophile non-investigation for a year and a half, from 2009 to late 2010. It was put on ice. The slow boat to China. Given File 13, as cops say.

Tom Corbett simply did not want to prosecute the Sandusky pedophile case.

"Tom didn't want to do it," I'm told.

"What do you mean, 'He didn't want to do it?'" I ask again.

"He didn't want to do it."

I have to keep asking the same question, and getting the same reply, before it begins sink in.

By assigning only a single trooper, yet not instructing or even allowing his prosecutor to push the case, AG Tom Corbett did the bare minimum he could do to cover his ass and to say that he was doing something about the Sandusky pedophile complaint(s).

In actuality Tom Corbett was doing nothing, except, intentionally or not, protecting and shielding Jerry Sandusky, and Sandusky's well-connected associates and institutions.

This would be exactly the same excuse offered by Pope Benedict in Rome to explain why pedophile complaints had languished for decades in his old Vatican office, without a good shepherd, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, before his election as pope. "Stavamo lavorando su di esso." That's Italian for, "We were working on it."

The cardinal's inactions hurt the papacy.

Just as Attorney General Corbett's inactions now injure the governor's office.

The green-domed Harrisburg state capitol building, I should mention, is modeled after St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Candidate Corbett orders background investigations of 356 potential 'Bonusgate' jurors

Over time it became all-too apparent to those working in the AG's office that Tom Corbett's "Bonusgate" investigation itself was political in nature. "Bonusgate" was used by AG Corbett as his main strategy and pillar in his political run for the governor's office.

It was stunning hypocrisy. AG Corbett was running for governor by prosecuting public employees for mixing elective politics with state work. Corbett was now openly doing the same thing: mixing elective politics with state work. The attorney general was prosecuting others, and jailing them, for doing what he was now doing, and making his staff do.

No one seemed able to speak out about it. At least, no one could be heard.

"The whole AG's office knew we were helping Tom Corbett to get elected governor," is one complaint I've heard. "Our focus from 2008 on was that. Everybody was working on 'Bonusgate.'" And, "The whole office was political."

The AG's office, now running its boss for governor, simply had no time, or resources, for the Sandusky pedophile case -- even if there was the will to pursue the allegations, which there was not.

'Corbett feared with apparently characteristic paranoia that his political opponents might somehow have tampered with the jury.

Candidate Corbett ordered the entire staff of BCI agents to drop everything to perform background investigations of all 350-odd potential jurors'

There were instead growing bumps and harrowing potholes along the way to victory in prosecutor Corbett's election road map to the state house. These problems caused candidate Corbett to further misuse the AG's staff for political purposes and ends.

An early jury acquittal in the "Bonusgate" prosecutions -- the December 2009 acquittal of former state Rep. Sean Ramaley -- caused gubernatorial hopeful Corbett to outright panic.

Corbett feared that his simple political strategy would fail. Worse, he feared with apparently characteristic paranoia that his political opponents in the Democratic Party -- or even a potential primary opponent, former U.S. attorney Patrick Meehan -- might somehow have tampered with the acquitting jury.

At one point, I'm told, candidate and AG Corbett ordered his entire Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) staff of agents to "drop everything" to perform secret background investigations of all 350-odd people in the jury pool for the upcoming, and politically important, "Bonusgate" trials involving former General Assembly Democratic Whip Mike Veon, and other Democrats. (I'm told the exact number of names on the list of potential jurors who underwent secret backgrounds checks by BCI agents on candidate Corbett's orders was 356.)

"Everyone in the BCI had to drop whatever they were doing to do background investigations of the 'Bonusgate' jurors."

There would be no time for Jerry Sandusky or his young victims in the middle of all that political craziness.

Poor ethics create more problems in the AG's office

The state attorney general's Bureau of Criminal Investigations, like the other units in the AG's office, is comprised of a relatively small and close-knit community of agents. At the start of the "Bonusgate" investigations, in the 2007 to 2008 time frame, about 74 agents worked in BCI around the state.

As Corbett's electioneering and paranoia intensified, the internal distractions, mismanagement and turmoil within the department caused the number of BCI agents to drop by about 15 percent, to about 63 or 64 agents.

Other growing yet ignored management problems like those in BCI's Norristown regional office, outside Philadelphia, plagued the office and its ability to conduct, well, actual criminal investigations.

"There were major problems in BCI in Norristown. Personnel problems. A supervisor was crazy over there. Lots of personnel issues. Everybody was leaving."

The growing political nature of their work, and the obvious hypocrisy of Corbett and his front office, dispirited the AG's office longtime professional staff.

Even Inspector Clouseau might notice what was going on.

Eet's a beumb!: 'Even Inspector Jacques Clouseau might notice what was going on'

Further manpower shortages adversely affected low- or no-priority cases like the Sandusky investigation. These management problems were exacerbated by the outright shoddy ethics of deputy AGs, and Corbett's tolerance and cover-up of shoddy ethics. Simply put, they'd shoot themselves in the foot.

The shortage of deputy AG's was made worse, for example, because Senior Deputy AG Patrick Leonard had to be transferred to State College after he was caught withholding exculpatory evidence in a case titled U.S.A. v. Eulises Rodrigues in federal court in Philadelphia in 2003.

Federal Judge Mary McLaughlin found Deputy AG Leonard, and others, guilty of what is called a Brady violation, or, in layman's terms, lying and withholding evidence.

"It is especially troublesome that Mr. Leonard told the Court during the trial that (a co-defendant and witness) Mr. Rivera was not telling the truth when it turned out that the other agents present at the sessions corroborated most of what Mr. Rivera said," Judge McLaughlin writes. "It also appears that Mr. Leonard did not follow the instruction of the United States Attorney’s Office that he was to tell counsel for the defendant what the co-defendant said at the proffer sessions."

Judge McLaughlin concluded, "The Court holds that the government’s failure to disclose to the defendant what was said by the co-defendant during the proffer sessions was a violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963)."

Leonard consequently could no longer partner with the federales to represent the AG's office in the federal Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania.

So Deputy AG Leonard was shipped off to Happy Valley. Another deputy AG had to pick up his slack in the east. I'm told there are several disreputable deputy AG's who've been found guilty of lying and/or withholding evidence in the AG's office. All the lying scoundrels were afforded protection by Corbett and tucked away in outposts like Scranton, where they continue to practice law for the AG's office and represent The People in court.

"Just don't do it here," became a management credo in Tom Corbett's AG's office for people other than Jerry Sandusky.

Later, after Corbett's election as governor, other lying scoundrels and Corbett simpaticos would be rewarded with jobs in the governor's press office.

Bonus for 'Bonusgate' prosecutor?

Mixing with the outright malfeasance and the incendiary atmosphere of politics in the AG's office was a growing odor of blatant hypocrisy.

Allegations flew that one of Corbett's own "Bonusgate" prosecutors himself misused the services of his AG's office secretary to help with his private work at home. "She was helping the prosecutor with his school work."

AG Corbett ironically in early 2006 elevated this compromised prosecutor to the newly created Public Corruption Unit.

AG's office staff were angered that this deputy AG, like Corbett, was prosecuting people for doing what he himself was openly accused of doing within the department: misusing his state worker staff and office resources for personal goals, private chores, champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

I furthermore hear complaints that AG Corbett approved a $20,000 bonus (or pay raise) to this same deputy AG for the fellow's successful prosecution of "Bonusgate" defendants leading to Corbett's election as governor.

I'm told one prominent "Bonusgate" prosecutor left the AG's office in outraged indignation over this bonus payment given to another "Bonusgate" prosecutor.

I paraphrase, with more than a crumb of irony, the Patriot-News, here:

What is clear is the payment(s) have stung some AG office employees who were left out, and raised questions for them about whether the payments to the deputy AG were tied to work on "Bonusgate."

The difference I suppose between me and the Patriot-News is that I hold out very little hope that Corbett, or any other public office holder in Pennsylvania, will investigate this any time soon.

There is no one to even take the complaint.

The simple complaint is this: AG Tom Corbett ran for governor by prosecuting his political enemies for bonuses they had given their staff. Yet Corbett himself countenanced political work and even a fat bonus to his staff for the overtly political "Bonusgate" prosecutions, the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign.

Staff members say this:

"A deputy AG got an extra $20,000 in pay because of 'Bonusgate' for his help getting Corbett elected governor. The politics and hypocrisy simply smacked you in the face. Of course no one could talk about it."

"The main concern was the 'Bonusgate' stuff was to get Corbett elected. Everyone knew it but they couldn't talk about it."

A laughable punch line: 'I'm referring this matter to AG Tom Corbett'

Everyone instead had to pretend that none of this was going on. You'd keep your tongue in your cheek, in more ways than one. The AG's office was living a fairy tale existence while Jerry Sandusky was allowed to keep on keeping on.

"Nobody would talk about stuff like that. They'd just try to do their job."

That was the case with the lonely state trooper and prosecutor assigned to the sandbagged Sandusky non-investigation. They went on to work other cases. Later, they'd have to pretend they were actually grinding away on the Sandusky case from March 2009 to October 2010.

The AG office staff instead grumbled and laughed about the seemingly endless "arrests by new conference," and the well-publicized TV perp walks of Mike Veon and his fellow "Bonusgate" defendants. Later on, a few over-the-hill Republicans would be tossed to the cameras on the perp walk. But AG Corbett's ally Republicans in powerful leadership positions, particularly in the state Senate, were, like Jerry Sandusky, protected, shielded, and left untouched.

Across the board, at every turn: no use harming Tom's prospects at the polls. This was not just an unwritten policy in State College with Jerry Sandusky: in Republican strongholds like Harrisburg, Altoona and York political friends and party hacks finding themselves in sticky wicket criminal straights were protected by AG Corbett leading up to his gubernatorial campaign.

Around Pennsylvania, a new joke punch line was delivered by Republican district attorneys, a joke so funny that it knocked everybody to the floor with laughter: "I'm referring this matter to Attorney General Tom Corbett." Everybody knew and well expected that AG Corbett wouldn't actually do anything.

And so when Centre County DA Michael Madeira referred his Sandusky complaint to his former boss, AG Tom, Corbett, in March 2009, it was, we should presume, done with the same tongue-in-cheek knowledge that Corbett would simply and safely sit on the damn complaint, and do nothing.

Not the good shepherd

It was all about priorities.

Or, rather, misplaced priorities. In Jerry Sandusky's case, the wolf was left to hound the sheep while the appointed shepherd was out glad-handing on the rubber chicken circuit, raking in cool millions in campaign contributions from Penn State-related benefactees, big wheels and alums.

Many of Corbett's State College political contributors, in turn, benefited from vast millions from broadcast rights to PSU football games from the television networks. (Again, consider how much of this is corporate media driven.)

Tom Corbett's unspoken and unwritten real job in all this, as he and his cohorts see it, is not to enforce the law, but to keep the party rolling.

"Vote for me, and you won't have anything to worry about here," was the not-so-subtle message, I'm told, Corbett exuded both in his 2008 reelection campaign for AG, and governor. "I'm the guy who'll keep the lid on things."

When the lid finally blew off at Penn State, Corbett would hurt a lot of people.

'Tom Corbett is amoral, and not particularly smart. You don't have to be particularly sharp in a drawer full of spatulas'

Tom Corbett's first basic instinct is not to ask himself whether a given course of action is the right thing to do, or even whether it's the lawful thing to do. He certainly doesn't ask himself whether it's the smart thing to do. His first most basic instinct is to ask himself, Will this hurt me or our guys?

Tom Corbett is amoral, and is not particularly smart. You don't have to be particularly sharp in a drawer full of spatulas.

Part of Corbett's problem is the great success that former Gov. Tom Ridge and Sen. Arlen Specter had in stacking up the courts and bureaucracies with GOP hacks who just go along with whatever ridiculous things fellow party hacks say and do. Corbett himself was one of Tom Ridge's installed party hacks.

So Corbett did not have to be particularly smart; he simply does dumb things knowing the other party hacks will cover his ass. His job, in turn, is to cover their asses.

Dull-witted Republican Party hacks, like pigeons, nest everywhere today at Pennsylvania's federal and state courthouses, and in all other houses and levels of government. They've grown used to doing dumb things that won't stand up to scrutiny, because everybody goes along. Party hackdom, mediocrity, and going along with the pack were Corbett's successful spawning ground.

Corbett's predecessor in the governor's chair, Ed Rendell, by comparison, is smarter than Tom Corbett. Rendell came up in the much more contentious rough and tumble of Philadelphia politics and had to sharpen himself or be eaten by others.

Rendell's always thinking a couple steps ahead. "Wherever there's a fire, there's Eddie with his bag of marshmellows," we used to say. They don't call him "Fast Eddie" without reason. Slow Tom, on the other hand, is always left to ruminate over the crap he's already stepped in.

Corbett does not understand why it is important for a governor, or even an attorney general, to be a good steward or shepherd for all the people of Pennsylvania. He doesn't want to waste his limited energy or abilities on such concepts. He would much rather have a newspaper party hack write an article portraying him as a good shepherd, than having to himself figure out what that is, and what that means.

The good shepherd, I'll note here, is a parable told by Jesus as related in John 10:11-12: "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away."

Tom Corbett was not a good shepherd. He allowed himself to become the hired hand of political and corporate interests. He was not about to lay down his life to protect the sheep. Hell, he wasn't even willing to risk losing the election for the sheep, let alone his life.

No use wrecking Tom's election by looking into Jerry's erection.

Outside of TV land, in reality, there simply was no separating the "Bonusgate" prosecutions from Corbett's campaign for governor.

There was no separating most everything else that did and did not happen in the AG's office from Corbett's campaign for governor. The two became inexorably entwined.

'The whole office was political'

Tom Corbett's gubernatorial campaign became all about his prosecutions, and his management of the AG's office.

It follows, though less focused upon by the public, Tom Corbett's AG's office was all about his campaign for governor.

As I write this, the AG's office website still features a healthy dollop of Tom Corbett's campaign photo ops and videos, where he poses as a concerned and diligent prosecutor and public servant.

In reality, he was a candidate for governor.

In the end, Tom Corbett's crusading "Bonusgate" political strategy paid off, at least for him, at least for a while. Corbett was elected governor in November 2010. He would become the first elected AG to make the leap to the governor's office.

Corbett's election as governor would come at a great cost to the office of attorney general. The morale and simple self-respect of the AG's office staff remain deeply harmed.

Also harmed were the truth, Pennsylvania, and children.

Kissing the Ring

The AG's office further deteriorated following Corbett's election as governor. By the understood yet unspoken rules of the political spoils system, those who had helped Corbett naturally hoped to be repaid by a patronage appointment from him.

Job seekers would 'Kiss the Ring.' Some reporters would kiss other parts of Tom Corbett

"Everybody was jockeying for position for another job."

Corbett found himself treated with new deference. Many openly sought a promotion from him, or a job out of the AG's office altogether.

"Kissing the ring, we called it."

("Kissing the ring," of course, is a phrase used to describe one's interactions with a pope or a bishop. "You can't clean up the church if the bishop is corrupt," an old Sicilian proverb goes, I'm told.)

Some soon felt politically betrayed by Corbett.

source:   yardbird.com

"Everybody was complaining they got him supporters and contributors but got nothing in return from Corbett."

Groups like the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police), for example, had supported Corbett, but he'd done little in return for many of its members who'd help him politically with their official AG's office work.

The moment Tom Corbett was sworn in as governor he would get to name his own successor as attorney general. The AG would once again be an appointee of the governor, a throwback to the days before the office became elective in 1980.

Almost immediately after Corbett's election as governor, Corbett's First Deputy Attorney General, William Ryan, Jr., was discussed in the state press as a logical choice for AG appointment.

The AG office's second in command, Ryan was a career prosecutor who'd worked his way up through the ranks in the AG's office since 1997. Under AG Mike Fisher he'd run the Criminal Law Division. Ryan understood the office, how it worked and (for cases like that of Jerry Sandusky) how it didn't work. He was also himself deeply enmeshed in the "Bonusgate" prosecutions.

A few days after the election, Ryan was featured prominently in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article written by Brad Bumsted titled, "Who's Corbett's pick for attorney general?"

"A likely contender for the (AG's) job is William H. Ryan Jr., Corbett's first assistant and a career prosecutor," Bumsted writes.

Ryan was even on hand to Kiss the Ring as the polls closed on election night.

"On election night, Ryan attended Corbett's party for supporters at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown," Bumsted reports. "Asked about the possibility of his nomination, Ryan said he had not discussed it with Corbett.

"'What I'd do is talk to Tom and take it from there,' said Ryan."

Bumsted noted, "Jack Barbour, a Pittsburgh lawyer who co-chaired Corbett's campaign, said numerous people tried to talk to him about appointments and 'transition team issues,' and he told them to wait until after the election."

After the election, though, Gov.-elect Corbett instead anointed Linda Kelley, a prosecutor from Pittsburgh, as AG.

First Deputy AG Ryan would be passed over for the honor.

One complaint to hit my ear:

"William Ryan hoped to be the new AG. When he was passed over for Kelly, Ryan got all pissed off. He said he's not making any major decisions until Kelly comes in. They weren't making any promotions, or anything."

But it was little understood by the public that Corbett would not officially nominate Linda Kelly for the AG job until February 8, 2011. Even less understood by the public was that Kelly would not assume office, or any of its powers, until she was confirmed by vote of the state Senate several months afterward, on May 23.

Until then, at the moment Tom Corbett was sworn in as governor, on January 18, 2011, by writ of the Commonwealth Attorneys Act, a "pissed off" First Deputy Attorney General William Ryan became Acting Attorney General.

Under the tenure of Acting AG Ryan, one promotion would be made.

The investigation of Jerry Sandusky would receive a sudden and dramatic promotion in importance, resources, and priority.

The writing on the wall

Following Tom Corbett's election as governor in November 2010, more troubling writing soon emerged on the wall. In this case, the electronic wall.

In this politically charged environment, about the time of Corbett's election as governor, AG's Office narcotics Agent Anthony Sassano conducted a routine "toll search" in connection with a State College-area drug investigation and got a surprise hit on his PACE Explorer computer database.

Narcotics Agent Sassano discovered that a pedophile complaint concerning Jerry Sandusky had been filed in Corbett's office way back in early 2009. What's up with that?

Once the right hand was aware of what the left was not doing, other things became apparent.

Agent Sassano quickly learned that Centre County DA Ray Gricar had investigated a pedophile complaint against Sandusky in 1998. The agent soon helped piece together another story, told in public postings in Internet chat boards, concerning Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary.

McQueary saw something that deeply troubled him in 2002 involving Sandusky and a boy in the PSU shower room. He'd reported it to Penn State officials, including Coach Paterno. But had those PSU officials reported anything to DA Ray Gricar?

DA Ray Gricar, and what Gricar may or may not have known about Sandusky and these complaints, suddenly became, well, important. Trouble was, DA Gricar had mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth in April 2005. Ray wasn't going to be talking to anyone in the AG's office any time soon. Nor could invisible Ray provide much insight about Sandusky's earlier legal treatment, status, or much of anything else, for that matter, including the weather, or what he might have for lunch.

As Clarence the Angel tells George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, "Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

Whither Ray?

By now even Inspector Clouseau could divine there was more amiss than just DA Ray in Tom Corbett's troubled AG's office.

DA Ray Gricar with Tom Corbett, about two weeks before Gricar's disappearance

'It became all too apparent that here was a multi-layered, FUBAR clusterfuck in the office of the state attorney general'

It became all too apparent that here was a multi-layered, FUBAR clusterfuck in the office of the state attorney general. And it was heading to the governor's office.

Why hadn't Corbett pushed to solve DA Gricar's disappearance, or even seemed much concerned about it?

Following DA Gricar's much celebrated strange vanishing, AG Corbett had just as mysteriously refused to allocate much in the way of resources to address Gricar's non-existence. Oh, a state police unit was assigned to supposedly look into Gricar's non-whereabouts. But that was just another one of Corbett's Keystone Kops details, one State College private investigator tells me. "Those guys didn't know shit from shinola."

AG's office flaks were still putting out the line that perhaps DA Ray, looking forward to retirement in a few months, had simply "wandered off," leaving behind his family and his well-vested pension, and that DA Ray was most likely not the victim of anything untoward. Like the 2008 Sandusky complaint, the disappearance of DA Ray Gricar was for some reason never at all a priority of Tom Corbett's.

The one law enforcement official -- Ray Gricar -- who could best shed light on the multiple Sandusky pedophile complaint(s) himself was long gone, and AG Corbett had long ago allowed the trail to go stone cold, cold, cold.

What was up with that?

Corbett avoids assigning Sandusky case to AG's Child Predator Unit: 'Could have done a quick grand jury in two months' time' Why had there been no serious investigation or prosecution of Jerry Sandusky before the 2010 governor's election? Do we really need to ask?

Tom Corbett simply did not want a Sandusky pedophile investigation to go forward, going back to 2009, those with knowledge of the case say.

Now that he'd won the governor's office, Corbett was out of the way. He'd used the AG's office as a political stalking horse, and now he climbed off the broken beast and sauntered away to greener pastures. Corbett got what he'd wanted, and that was all that mattered to him.

"Corbett didn't want the Sandusky investigation to go forward. He resisted it for some reason. There was no priority at all to it. He told his staff he didn't want to do it. Corbett was the problem."

Corbett associates point out that AG Corbett had every opportunity to pursue the investigation for a year and a half, and had many venues available to him to do it, his lame excuses involving "Bonusgate," and "slow grand juries" notwithstanding.

For example, AG Corbett could simply have assigned the 2008-2009 Sandusky complaint(s) to the AG office's much-ballyhooed Child Predator Unit, which would have been a normal and logical course of action for a case like this.

"In order for law enforcement to stay one step ahead of ... sexual predators the Office widened the scope of the Attorney General's task force into a larger, broader statewide Child Predator Unit," the AG's office website explains.

"In January 2005, a dedicated Child Predator Unit was created using a group of specially trained agents and prosecutors across Pennsylvania to identify and capture ... predators before they can harm children," the webpage goes on to tell voters.

The webpage reminds us, "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that one in five girls and one in ten boys are sexually exploited before they reach adulthood." Tom Corbett would do nothing to improve those statistics.

In 2011, in fact, the AG's office crowed that its hard-working Child Predator Unit had, since its inception in 2005, arrested 298 child predators. Jerry Sandusky would never be among the hundreds arrested by the unit.

"The Child Predator's Unit could have done a quick grand jury in two months time back in 2009, arrested Jerry Sandusky like all the other predators and got him off the street."

But that never happened. AG Corbett didn't seem to trust his own vaunted Child Predator Unit to handle the Sandusky case, or to get the job done.

Or, alternately, Corbett could have chosen to assign the Sandusky case to his Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force, which was formed in 1995.

"The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General has also been recognized as a leading law enforcement agency in this area with respect to its proactive 'sting' operations aimed at pedophiles and child pornographers," the AG's Child Exploitation Task Force's webpage explains. "These 'sting' operations are designed to arrest and convict those individuals who actively seek teen and pre-teen children to engage in deviate sexual conduct. Through continued cooperation and support, the Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force will work to eradicate crimes against our children while keeping pace with today's technology."

The Child Sexual Exploitation Task Force evidently couldn't keep pace with the AG office's own PACE computer system, where evidence lurked for a year and a half of the languishing Sandusky pedophile complaint(s) referred to Corbett's office in March 2009.

You begin to get the picture. AG Corbett had many venues available to him to get the Sandusky case moving, if he so chose. He simply chose not to, as those around Corbett say.

Making sad matters even more ridiculous, after the nationwide public relations fiasco of the Sandusky case hit the fan in November 2011, Gov. Corbett would disingenuously propose yet another agency in the AG's office to supposedly follow through on child abuse complaints. Talk about the fox watching the hen house.

Informed parents and children for their own safety would be better advised to avoid the office of Pennsylvania Attorney General altogether. It's simply not a safe or responsible place, at the moment, for kids.

In fairness to the hard-working and genuinely concerned members of these child predator units, I should point out the obvious: Tom Corbett was the problem here, not them. It was the injection of politics into the office of attorney general that's the problem. The inherent political nature of the office remains. And that's a big problem, as we now see.

A moveable scandal: Gov-elect Corbett removed as obstacle, AG office nabs Sandusky in several months' time It's a matter of public record how fast things happened once Tom Corbett won his governor's election and was on his way out the AG office door, leaving behind a broken and demoralized AG's office staff.

It was a magic moment, a transition time between two attorneys general where the professional staff has greater-than-normal latitude.

The involvement of the narcotics unit officer, and the subsequent discovery of the two earlier Sandusky complaints, tied together with the vanishing of DA Ray Gricar, now made the case compelling, to say the least.

No time was now wasted. In December 2010, Mike McQueary was finally put in front of the soon-to-expire Thirtieth Statewide Grand Jury. "The graduate assistant was never questioned by University Police and no other entity conducted an investigation until he testified in Grand Jury in December, 2010," the Sandusky grand jury presentment tellingly concludes.

On January 12, 2011, less than a week before Tom Corbett was sworn in as governor, Penn State officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz finally made it before the Thirtieth Grand Jury, perjuring themselves, the AG's office later would allege.

Like the earlier grand juries, those grand jurors wouldn't be given much of a crack at the case. In fact, the Thirtieth Grand Jury was set to expire at the end of January 2011, only a month after they'd first heard from McQueary. In February a new statewide investigating Grand Jury, officially numbered the Thirty-Third, loaded with newcomers, would have to be convened and sworn in to take fresh testimony long overdue in the Sandusky case.

Meanwhile, late in January 2011, seven additional state police and AG office agents were now assigned to the Sandusky investigation(s). The priorities and resources were finally beginning to be placed.

Karen Arnold would be one of the witnesses to testify before the new, Thirty-Third Statewide Grand Jury. Arnold was a Centre County Assistant DA (ADA) working under District Attorney Ray Gricar when the first complaint had been filed against Jerry Sandusky in 1998. She briefly was assigned the Sandusky case.

Former ADA Arnold tells me that she only had the 1998 Sandusky case for "two or three days" before DA Gricar, without explanation, took the case from her.

"Ray was my boss and he said he would handle it," former ADA Arnold says. "I only had the Sandusky case for a few days. I don't know why Ray handled it the way he did. I can't read his mind. I'm not a mind reader."

She says Ron Schreffler of the PSU police department originally referred the Sandusky case to the DA's office way back in 1998. Schreffler was an investigator with the university police department. He handled the original 1998 Sandusky complaint. Schreffler in those days oversaw most of the important investigations at the university, including those involving drugs, football betting, arson and bomb incidents. Schreffler helped produce the 100-plus-page report about the 1998 Sandusky incident that was referred to DA Gricar. That report has become one of the more sought after Pickwick Paper / MacGuffins in the current media paper chase for Sandusky documents.

Former ADA Arnold says she was contacted in February 2011 by a woman in the AG's office. She asked Arnold to testify before the new grand jury.

"'You shouldn't worry if you're not familiar with the grand jury process,'" Arnold says she was told by the AG's office contact, "'as these jurors are new too.'"

Arnold says she testified before the newly seated grand jury the day after Ash Wednesday, which places her testimony on March 10, 2011. Ash Wednesday is what is known as a "moveable feast." That's fitting, for a moveable scandal like this. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the 40 days Jesus fasted before beginning his ministry, during which time he was tempted, Scriptures say, by Satan.

"The grand jury experience was one of the more negative experiences in my life," Arnold says. She adds, "There are aspects of the Sandusky case this grand jury ignored and that will bite them in the ass if the case goes forward."

She wondered aloud about the multiple grand juries involved in the case, and how much of the hundreds of pages of testimony had been produced by which of the jurors. "You have to wonder what's going on," she says.

Within a few months of her testimony -- and more than a dozen years after DA Ray Gricar took the 1998 case away from her -- Jerry Sandusky would finally be arrested for predatory acts against children.

Karen Arnold would suddenly be inundated with telephone calls from media, and a New York Times reporter would be pounding on her door.

Like some long overdue bill, the grand jury presentment finally was delivered and Sandusky arrested in November 2011. Much of the glory would go to a newly appointed and confirmed Attorney General Linda Kelly. But she hadn't come to office until late May 2011.

Not many in the public nor the media understood that the ball really got rolling in the Sandusky case when the AG's office was helmed by Acting Attorney General William Ryan, who had been passed over by Gov. Corbett for the AG's job. Ryan accomplished in several weeks and months' time what AG Corbett could not do in a year and a half.

And what became of Bill Ryan?

On August 19, 2011, less than two months before Sandusky's arrest, Governor Tom Corbett announced he'd appointed Ryan chairman of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. The former Acting AG would now be in charge of the state's casinos and racetracks.

source:   yardbird.com

"Bill's proven integrity and more than three decades of experience as a prosecutor will serve him well as the new chairman of the Gaming Control Board," Corbett said.

Ryan obviously knows more than just prosecuting. Ryan obviously knows something about gambling, and politics, and how both games are played.

JoePa takes the fall for TomCo

For Gov. Tom Corbett, meanwhile, there remained one more important task following the nationwide public relations fiasco of Jerry Sandusky's long-overdue arrest. Corbett had to protect his own carcass, and cover his own ass for the nuclear blast he now feared was about to blow.

It wouldn't do to have the public focus on Corbett's own refusal to investigate or prosecute Jerry Sandusky for a year and half. Corbett sought to change the conversation. He looked around for a likely scapegoat(s) to take the fall for him. What's one more victim, or two?

Corbett incredibly settled on a beloved 85-year-old to take the fall. The Gipper was down, why not kick him down some more? Gov. Corbett landed on the brilliant idea of throwing Joe Paterno under the bus. As Nixon observed, when the wolves are gaining, it's time to toss a baby from the sled.

After all, hadn't Joe Paterno failed to follow up by calling the university police or DA Gricar in 2002? It wasn't nearly as bad as deliberately sandbagging the Sandusky case for a year and half, and actively shielding and protecting Jerry Sandusky, as AG Corbett had done.

But Corbett knows from first-hand experience that today's corporate media is servile, for the most part isn't all that smart or morally scrupulous, and doesn't look into things all that deeply or for very long. And more and more these days they simply write what they're handed. Corbett himself learned this on his long slog for the governor's chair, and all through the recent years of growing corruption in Pennsylvania. That business with the 6,500 kids sold down the river in Wilkes-Barre had blown over. Maybe the serial rape of innumerable kids at Penn State will blow over too.

Corbett's job as attorney general had been to prosecute. To uphold the law. To protect the public. He didn't do so well in that job. Now, as governor, the job was altogether different.

A competent governor, and a good man, would have, and should have, asked the public not to rush to judgment against Joe Paterno. A competent leader, and a good man, would have asked the public to wait for all the facts to come in. A competent governor, and a good man, would have reminded the public of the great and exemplary services performed for Pennsylvania, and Penn State, by Joe Paterno in over 60 years on the job. A competent governor, and a good man, would have pointed out that that Joe Paterno was Our Coach.

'Joe Paterno was Pennsylvania's Coach, and we owed him, in his final days, a debt of gratitude, not a death of instant scandal and ruin'

Joe Paterno was Pennsylvania's Coach, and we owed him, in his final days, a debt of gratitude, not a death of instant scandal and ruin.

"It's going to kill Joe," suddenly was on everyone's lips. "It's going to kill him."

Tom Corbett, as usual, had his own not-so-sorry ass to worry about. It would be the pathetic act of a desperate, morally bankrupt man.

On November 9, 2011, Gov. Tom Corbett indulged the Penn State board of trustees, by telephone, to throw Joe Paterno under the bus. At the moment of the vote to fire Paterno, Corbett said over the speakerphone, "Remember that little boy in the shower." From the 31 trustees in the room there was no response. No question. No objection. Just silence. Despite the illustrious backgrounds of most of them, they all marched in lockstep, following Corbett's lead.

Corbett wasn't there to look them, or Paterno, in the eye. He wasn't there to explain why he had done nothing to help that little boy. He wasn't there to explain why he himself had prevented any investigation for a year and a half. He wasn't there to explain the double standard. Why should the coach be punished, but not the attorney general/governor? As I say, in Tom Corbett's Pennsylvania, some are more privileged than others.

That night Corbett got his scapegoat, and the students rioted in State College. A weary nation turned its eyes to the fleeting images of the saddened cries, groans and crashes of the decline and fall of Pennsylvania.

A simmering story in the sports columns in moments ignited into an all-consuming firestorm, a national disgrace, and a world-class scandal.

Tom Corbett's self-serving decision to sack Coach Joe Paterno and make Paterno the fall guy in this long-running tragedy was as if, one observer told me, "the A-bomb had been used to detonate the H-bomb."

But competence, and properly handling a delicate, important matter, after all, has never been Tom Corbett's forte. Tom Corbett's forte has always been fixing cases.

This time, if there remains any justice at all on earth and in heaven, the fix might yet fix him.

As I finish writing this essay, sadly, news arrives of the passing of Coach Joe Paterno.

What this is called

How had we come to this?

It is Acting Attorney General Bill Ryan's role as state attorney general in the magic moment period between Corbett and Kelly that bears our close consideration.

It is that magic moment itself, that period between the transactions, when politics is there, and isn't there, that deserves our thoughts.

It is indeed a magic moment. It is a moment when law enforcement professionals in Pennsylvania can, in the most amazingly unfettered fashion, do something extraordinary.

With the Sandusky case, after all, Acting Attorney General Bill Ryan didn't have to do much of anything but give proper priority to the case, assign it proper resources, and sit back and watch the process take its normal course.

It's one more measure of our collective sickness, and our jaded expectations of political machinations, that we have to wonder at all about the motivations behind this once-normal process.

Enforcing the law, it used to be called at the attorney general's office.

-- Bill Keisling IV

posted January 22, 2012

This is the second of a planned three-part essay. Read the first part, Busted: Narcotics officer nabs Sandusky, here >. Check back soon for the conclusion, The Magic Moment ...

Related:

Busted: Narcotics agent nabs Jerry Sandusky

PA Attorney General Tom Corbett was obstacle preventing 'VIP' sex ring investigation

Pennsylvania DA Tom Kearney asks FBI to investigate Corbett security contractor

Video: York lawyer Larry Heim boasts of courthouse pedophile ring

Jerry Sandusky Grand Jury report

Bubba Takes the Fall: Missing county sofa found in DA's basement

York County has long history of harming kids

Depostion of Det. Jeffrey Martz

Pennsylvania State Police launch investigation into PA Turnpike security provider

PA Turnpike security contractor seeks federal injunction to ban Luna book

Wantz dropped from PA House hearing on private investigators

External links:

Sex bust nabs state security contractor -- ABC News

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