Contrary to popular belief, the Sandusky grand jury presentment was NOT leaked to the media on Friday, November 4th -- but it appears that was the intent.
By
Ray Blehar
April 9, 2017, 8:57 AM EDT
When former OAG
prosecutor Jonelle Eshbach called Mike McQueary on November 4th,
2011 to warn him about an impending leak of grand jury information, she likely
believed he was about to be engulfed in a firestorm. McQueary testified that Esbach informed him:
"we're going to arrest folks and we are going to leak it out."
Much to Eshbach's surprise, the presentment was not leaked that evening.
A draft presentment was attached to the 37-count Affidavit Of Probable Cause that was registered with the Centre County Prothonotary’s office at 12:21
PM on November 4, On or about that time, the Sandusky
docket (identifying the charges) from the Centre County magistrate was posted on Pennsylvania’s
Unified Judicial System.
To be clear, the Sandusky charges --not the presentment -- were the “leaked” information that the Attorney General's office attributed to a computer “glitch" (they later blamed Centre County Magistrate Leslie Dutchcot for the leak).
Sara Ganim used the docket for her “exclusive” report that Friday night.
The chain of events that led to Ganim's "exclusive"
included the docket being posted in the afternoon, the Patriot News calling Judge Dutchot's office
demanding it be taken down, its removal from the system, Ganim's story
being posted, then the docket being posted again.
Somewhere in that flurry was also a heated exchange between the
AG's press officer, Nils Frederiksen and Ganim.
Firestorm Delayed
Ganim’s column didn’t cause much of a stir that Friday night and
into Saturday.
As it turned out, the PSU beat writers who were supposed to have
read the highly inflammatory grand jury presentment on Friday night were
instead treated to a boring court
docket that didn’t mention
PSU football or Joe Paterno.
Rumor has it that with the weekend of no PSU football, the writers
stayed in bed all day and watched a Rudy marathon.
There was little to no mention of the Sandusky case that Saturday
in the national media.
However, by Sunday morning, the news of the presentment began to
hit the sports media and by that afternoon, McQueary had been easily identified
as the graduate assistant involved -- and he was being “hammered” for “running home to his daddy” as a
boy was being raped by Sandusky.
Those were the “Findings of Fact” – according to AG Linda Kelly and they were being publicized as if they were irrefutable. The firestorm was underway – but had not yet engulfed Paterno and
Penn State. That blaze could arrive on Monday when former
Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner, Frank Noonan made remarks off-camera about Paterno's "moral responsibility."
Leaking
While it remains a mystery how the public came to perceive that the grand jury presentment was leaked, it is a fact that secret grand jury information was leaked (to the media) in the Sandusky and the Conspiracy of Silence cases for the purpose of influencing public opinion.
In the Sandusky case, prosecutors Frank Fina and Jonelle Eshbach requested Judge Barry Feudale's permission to investigate the leaks purportedly set a trap to catch the leaker. The courts, on numerous occasions in 2016 and 2017, used the Feudale endorsement of the investigation as evidence that Fina and Escbach weren't leakers because they asked a judge to oversee the investigation -- even though
Feudale leaked sealed documents in 2015.
Leaks have been pervasive in other cases, such as Bonusgate, Computergate, and the DeNaples case, but the AG and its media sycophants seemingly have little interest in finding those leakers.
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Shapiro (foreground) and Ferman (rear) pursued alleged leaks by Kane, but ignored leaks by many others |
In the state of Pennsylvania, leakers of grand jury and/or criminal investigative information are pursued only if their leaks expose corrupt and unethical practices by prosecutors, law enforcement, and judges and undo the charade that everyone is entitled to equal justice under the law in the Commonwealth.