NORRISTOWN, Pa. _ When Bruce Beemer read an article in the Philadelphia Daily News in 2014 that quoted from secret grand jury material from the Attorney General's Office, he was shocked.
Beemer, then the first deputy attorney general, called Attorney General Kathleen Kane and asked if he could look into it.
"She said, 'Don't worry about it, it's not a big deal, we have more important things to do,'" Beemer said Wednesday, recalling the June 2014 phone call as he testified at Kane's trial at Montgomery County Court in Norristown.
Kane is charged with perjury, obstruction and other crimes. She is accused of illegally leaking the secret grand jury information that was quoted in that 2014 Daily News article. Prosecutors say she was motivated by revenge against a critic, and that she later lied about the leak to cover it up.
In his phone call with Kane the morning the article was published, Beemer said he suspected the leak had come not from the attorney general herself, but from prosecutors or agents in their Norristown office, which had handled the investigation that was leaked.
So Kane's reaction to the article was not what he expected.
"I was a little surprised," Beemer said. "I thought it was incumbent on us to at least take a look into this to see what happened."
Beemer also jotted down notes about the article and his call with Kane that day. "Very troubling," he wrote on a notebook page that was presented as evidence at trial Wednesday.
Beemer followed Kane's order not to look into the leak, he said, but remained concerned.
When he learned that a judge had appointed a special prosecutor to look into the leak, he said he felt relieved.
But later that summer, he said, Kane called him with a request that he found disturbing: She wanted him to file a motion questioning the authority of the special prosecutor, and she told him that she did not think the information released to the Daily News was secret grand jury information.
"My heart sank," Beemer said, describing that call. "If the material that's in that document can be released, then we might as well do away with grand jury secrecy, because it has that much information, detail, about things that were accumulated and what witnesses said."
Months later, in another conversation in which Beemer said he was reluctant to do something Kane requested, he said she told him: "Bruce, if I were taken out of here in handcuffs, what do you think my last act would be?"
Asked if he still believed after that exchange that the leak of the grand jury material was from the Norristown office, Beemer testified, "I feared it was not."
Kane's defense lawyers began cross-examining Beemer on Wednesday morning as well. They pointed out that a judge had appointed a special prosecutor to review the leak before the Daily News article was even published and before Beemer asked Kane to investigate it. Beemer said no one in the attorney general's office was aware of the special prosecutor's investigation until weeks later.
A judge authorized the grand jury investigation on May 29, 2014. The Daily News story appeared June 6. It has not yet been revealed how the court learned of the leak before the story was published.
