The hits just keep coming

Chris Brennan has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about the porn scandal:

It seems more heads will roll (and maybe already have) in the porn scandal that has consumed our state government. Renee George Martin, a spokeswoman for state Attorney General Kathleen Kane (photo), yesterday confirmed that her office's human resources department is wrapping up an investigation into at least thirty current employees who used state computers or email accounts to send or receive pornography.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday reported that "six or more" employees have been fired or offered early retirement. "I can't confirm that number, six," Martin said. "I can't say who or what the discipline is." Kane will release a report on the discipline when it is completed, Martin said.
It was an earlier report that helped launch the scandal. Kane ran for office in 2012, questioning how Governor Corbett, when he was attorney general, handled the sexual-abuse case that sent former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky to prison. While recovering office emails for that review, Kane's staff noticed a pattern of past and current employees swapping explicit images and video in emails.
Four of Corbett's former top deputies resigned after Kane released some of the emails.
The list includes state Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Chris Abruzzo, DEP Chief Counsel Glenn Parno, Board of Probation and Parole member Randy Feathers, and Richard Sheetz Jr., who had returned to work at the Lancaster District Attorney's Office.
The biggest name snared in the porn scandal is state Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery, who resigned last week. McCaffery had been in a long-running feud with Chief Justice Ron Castille, who hammered him for the porn emails.
Another justice, J. Michael Eakin, then complained that McCaffery threatened to release Eakins' own racy and racist emails unless he found a way to make Castille back down in the dispute. McCaffery's colleagues then suspended him from the court.
There were new concerns this week about the potential for the emails to show ex parte communications between judges and prosecutors. Such communications can be considered legally inappropriate, since judges are required to be impartial to prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts called for Kane and the Supreme Court to "jointly appoint an independent, nonpartisan master to review the emails and issue a public report about the contents, including any misconduct such as ex parte communications."
State Senator Daylin Leach and three lawyers active in civil rights defense law and legal ethics, called on Castille and Kane, in a letter in yesterday's Daily News, to release all the emails. "Specifically, we call for a fully transparent process that includes public disclosure of all emails that have been passed between the Attorney General's Office and the Supreme Court, and any other similar ex parte communications with other lawyers or litigants before the court," they wrote.

Rico says politics does make for strange bedfellows...