After months of anguish and about $400,000 later, the much-anticipated Porngate investigation has come to an end with a thud rather than a bang.

Acting state Attorney General Bruce Beemer released the report that found 13 judges or senior state government officials were identified as high-volume senders of inappropriate emails. This included two former state Supreme Court justices who resigned when the scandal first broke.Who else was involved? I wish I could tell you, but the names of the perpetrators were blacked out (the more pleasant word used was "redacted") when the report was released to the public. Why didn't Beemer release the names? He said it would unfairly damage the reputations of workers in the state judicial system.Let me get this straight: These state employees, while on the clock working for us taxpayers, were using public computers to send and receive pornographic, misogynous and racist emails, but Beemer is concerned about their reputations?Yes, but he also is concerned about lawsuits, because there is a provision in union contracts that bar employees from embarrassment, and unions were threatening to sue if names were used without substantiation. Ah, but, fear not, Beemer said, "We are forwarding to the appropriate agencies or the appropriate employers information about what was found in this report to allow those individuals or agencies to do what they deem appropriate."Whew, that's a relief! At least we got a few crumbs for the taxpayer dollars spent on this whitewash job."This was an extraordinarily difficult decision for the attorney general's office and myself, personally, to make," Beemer said.More than 6.4 million emails and documents were reviewed, but he insists that there is nothing that seriously impacted the administration of justice in Pennsylvania.Former Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who resigned in disgrace after being found guilty of leaking grand jury information, then lying about it, hired a high-powered Washington, D.C., law firm to do an independent study of the emails after her office discovered that judges and prosecutors traded salacious emails containing racist pictures, women engaged in sexual acts and crude ethnic jokes and commentary.Kane, a Democrat elected in 2012, assured the public that she would release all of the emails and let the chips fall where they might, but instead she identified just eight of the emailers. All eight had ties to a former state prosecutor, Frank Fina, with whom Kane had had a running feud. This led to criticism that she was using the email investigation as revenge against her political enemies.Before releasing the 50-page report, Beemer dismissed it as shoddily researched and a poor use of taxpayer dollars.Former Attorney General Kane hired Douglas Gansler, a former Maryland attorney general, to conduct an independent investigation. At the time, we panned this unnecessary expenditure of taxpayer money, and, sure enough, we were right. Beemer slammed the report, saying Gansler's careless use of computer methodology to flag troubling emails led him to mislabel discussions of breast cancer as pornography. He said even a Budweiser beer commercial that had been televised during a Super Bowl was branded as lewd."There was no attempt to determine the context of the emails, the content and the relationship between the people sending the emails, and that created a real problem," Beemer said.On the other hand, there were messages that included lewd jokes about women, minorities and members of religions and comments demeaning to women, gays and ethnic minorities. An example of the ill-advised emails had a subject line "How Obama Plans to Catch Illegal Mexicans." Depicted was a bottle of Corona beer beneath a cardboard box trap.Caught in the headlights of this two-year investigation were former state Supreme Court justices Seamus McCaffery and J. Michael Eakin, along with three other state judges, and eight other senior state government officials. Among them were two police chiefs and a member of the state Legislature. The two justices resigned from the court after being publicly named in the scandal. Dozens of other lower-level officials resigned after also being implicated in the Porngate investigation.We do agree with the Gansler report on one major point. The investigation showed a failure by all branches of government to understand that a fair and unbiased government and legal system is dangerously compromised by the seemingly routine exchange of pornography and racist, misogynist and other offensive materials.By Bruce Frassinelli |

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