Kathleen Kane

NORRISTOWN — A political trial drawing to a close this week pits Pennsylvania’s attorney general against two former confidantes who testified against her in a perjury and obstruction case.

Kathleen Kane, a first-term Democrat, is charged with leaking secret grand jury files to a newspaper to embarrass a rival prosecutor and then lying about it under oath.

“Revenge is best served cold. Her words,” a prosecutor said in opening statements, nodding to Kane at the defense table.

The tale of personal feuds and political gossip spun in the suburban Philadelphia courtroom last week often seemed petty. But there were times the testimony veered into what prosecutors called Kane’s taste for “cloak and dagger” techniques.

Her political consultant described being taken by her security agents to a Philadelphia parking garage to be frisked for a wire — and stripped of his wallet, cell phone and keys — all so he could have lunch with Kane at a hotel.

They met to concoct a cover story for the grand jury, consultant Josh Morrow testified Thursday at the Montgomery County trial. Kane appeared unfazed by the felony accusations.

Whatever the trial’s outcome, her 800-person agency has been in turmoil for the past two years, plagued by a revolving door of top managers; a special investigation of the leak that led up to the boss; and the deployment of Kane’s driver to snoop through office e-mails and keep tabs on who was cooperating. Driver Patrick Reese is appealing a conviction for contempt of court for the computer searches.

Kane has battled back amid the furor, launching a probe of her own that led to two state Supreme Court justices stepping down. The first woman elected to the post, she publicized hundreds of offensive or mildly pornographic e-mails that were traded by what she called the “old boys network” of top lawyers and judges in state government.

The trial judge, though, barred her lawyers from mentioning the e-mail scandal as a defense.

Kane has said she wasn’t sworn to protect work from the 2009 grand jury probe of an NAACP leader because she was then a stay-at-home mother. However, prosecutors produced a secrecy oath she signed the day she took office. It covered 32 past grand juries, including the one that looked into the NAACP official’s finances. Prosecutors say he became collateral damage in Kane’s effort to embarrass the prosecutor who dropped the case.

A law school boyfriend-turned-top aide, Adrian King, testified that he had agreed to pass a manila envelope from Kane’s office in Harrisburg to Morrow’s home in Philadelphia. He said he never knew the envelope contained grand jury material, although Morrow disputed that. Morrow gave it to the Philadelphia Daily News, which worked on the story while Kane grew impatient, according to text messages shown in court.

“Where’s my story? I’m dying here,” Kane texted him.

The story ran in June 2014, and a special investigation into the leak soon followed. Kane, amid the criminal charges, did not run for re-election. She leaves office in January, unless a conviction or statehouse impeachment forces her out sooner.