Corbett adds that he was focusing his attentions instead on a long-running public corruption case known in Pennsylvania as “Bonusgate.” That, observers say, is somewhat closer to the truth.
But it’s not really the whole truth. The whole story is far more complex and troubling.
The whole story is, in fact, mind-boggling.
‘Get used to having your mind boggled’
As quantum luck and chance would have it, in December 2011, as I sat working on this essay, Pennsylvania’s Terry Gross, on her Philadelphia-based radio show Fresh Air, hosted astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, of U.C. Berkeley.
Prof. Perlmutter had just won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He spoke animatedly and in some detail with Gross about his work, concerning the red shift of light from supernovae, and other mind-bending matters of relativity and the universe.
Interviewer Gross admitted that her mind was boggled by Perlmutter’s work. Nothing, on close examination, was as it seemed it should be.
Laureate Professor Perlmutter laughed. Such is the nature of our everyday universe, he explained.
“What’s odd about this whole game is that you have to get used to having your mind boggled,” he tells Terry Gross. “Left and right.”
And so it is, I thought, in recent years with Pennsylvania politics, and our troubled state attorney general’s office. Pennsylvanians of late have been rocked by one mind-bending systemic public corruption scandal after another. We’ve grown used to having our minds boggled, left and right.
More than 6,500 children in Luzerne County, PA, were sold down the river to private detention facility owners who for years bribed state judges with $2.6 million to house the lodgers. Close relatives of state Supreme Court justices were caught up in this and other Dickensian criminal capers. The state’s chief justice himself in 2011 was caught funneling millions of dollars allocated for a Philadelphia family court construction project to a close associate and golf buddy. A state Supreme Court justice was impeached. As I write, another state Supreme Court justice has been informed that she is the target of yet another grand jury investigation. A state attorney general in the 1990s was convicted of taking bribes for years from organized crime and gambling figures. A powerful state senator for decades openly used political patronage and extortion to feather his private nest.
Complaints of many of these crimes were received in several state offices, but simply were ignored for years, like the Sandusky complaints. Time and again in Pennsylvania government, powerful insiders are protected from investigation while victimized citizens have nowhere to go with their complaints. Thus powerless victims are further victimized. At this party the band always plays on.
In each case, these scandals festered for years without the intervention of the state AG’s office. It was only the tardy involvement of federal investigators that finally brought some of these crimes to public view.
The inability of victimized Pennsylvanians to get help, or to simply be heard with their complaints, is at the heart of the overall problem. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania no longer has a government, or a press, that is much, if it all, interested in all of its citizens. Rather, privileged insiders (like Jerry Sandusky) have become all-important, and take precedence. It has become the Privilegedwealth of Pennsylvania.
How did we get here?
A lot of this, to paraphrase Terry Gross, simply is not as it should be. To understand the decades-running Sandusky story you have to be prepared to go from one mind-boggling event to another.
The bottom line is that Tom Corbett’s personal misuse of the state AG’s office to run for governor all but destroyed the morale and integrity of the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General. Previous to 1980 the AG was an appointed position. Elective politics have proven to be poison for the AG’s office.
Most ironically, the staff of the AG’s office has been left as helpless as the victims. No one working in the state AG’s office seems to know where to turn for help, or how to explain to the public the deep problems.
“It’s all politics,” with a sigh, is how I’ve heard described what’s going on.
Winning friends and influencing voters
To understand what’s going on in Pennsylvania, as well as Tom Corbett’s claims that a “slow grand jury” was responsible for his failure to act promptly to prosecute Jerry Sandusky, we have to attempt to wrap our minds around what in Pennsylvania has come to be called Corbett’s “Bonusgate” prosecutions.
Many Pennsylvania Democrats, independents and even old-time, fair-minded Republicans simply call it political persecution. But it’s more worrisome than that.
The “Bonusgate” case began in January 2007, a little more than two years before the Sandusky case was referred to AG Corbett.
It started with an article appearing in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. The Patriot is the capital city’s daily newspaper, with roots into the mid-19th century. Today the Patriot is Harrisburg’s only daily newspaper, and in modern times is owned by the Newhouse chain.
On January 27, 2007, the Patriot-News ran an article reporting that some unnamed Democrats working in the lower house of the legislature -- called in Pennsylvania the General Assembly, or simply the House -- received bonuses in their paychecks. What wasn’t so clear was why they’d received the salary bonuses.
The previous election cycle in 2006 brought the Democrats to a narrow 102 to 101 majority in the General Assembly, the Patriot-News pointed out.
Not everyone got the mysterious bonus in his or her paycheck.
“What was clear is the payments have stung some caucus employees who were left out, and raised questions for them about whether the payments were tied to work on legislative campaigns,” the Patriot’s Charles Thompson and Jan Murphy wrote.
The Patriot only mentioned names of prominent Democrat leaders. “Employees contacted by The Patriot-News who did not take campaign assignments this fall from (House Majority Leader Bill) DeWeese, former Democratic Whip Mike Veon, D-Beaver, or the House Democratic Campaign Committee said they did not receive a bonus. They spoke to the newspaper only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue,” the Patriot states.
It’s against the law, the Patriot reminded us, for state workers to be paid for political activities.
“It is a longstanding practice for many legislative staffers from both parties to take leave, compensatory or personal time to do volunteer work on campaigns,” the Patriot reported. “It would be illegal, however, for their employers to pay them for that work with state funds.”
In the old days, when Pennsylvania enjoyed a robust, independent, and critically thinking press, the editorial team at a daily newspaper like the Patriot would have naturally hoped that an article like this would spark the interest of some independent-minded government investigator. Perhaps the article’s concerns would be picked up, investigated, and championed by someone in neutral law enforcement, or the legislature.
Before the fall of newspapers and the rise of the Internet, to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, for example, one’s story usually had to be acted upon by some attorney general, district attorney, or legislative committee.
The Patriot clearly wished its story would be pursued by Attorney General Tom Corbett, for whom the paper even today often acts as chief cheerleader and defender.
The newspaper’s editors got their wish. Within days, in February 2007, AG Corbett announced that his public corruption unit would “look into” the Patriot’s suggestion that the legislative staff bonuses were tied to campaign work.
(Since the time of Corbett’s election as attorney general in 2004, the Patriot would be about the only state publication that I’m aware of that would be successful in getting AG Corbett to investigate anything.)
For Corbett, in 2007 already contemplating his run for governor in 2010, the Patriot’s article proved irresistible. The Patriot had a large, captive audience in Republican-sodden central Pennsylvania. And, after all, the Patriot’s articl
e mentioned only problems in the opposition Democratic caucus.
Fair enough, I suppose. Here was a story of interest, involving political work at the state capitol. And here was an elected Republican attorney general saying he’d look into it.
Trouble is, to say you’ve found politics in the state capital building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a lot like saying you’ve found a turd in a sewage treatment plant.
That’s where you find it.
Operatives of both political parties at the capitol continuously practice elective politics. Legislative workers engaging in politics are as common as oil paintings and colored floor tiles in the rotunda.
Elective politics and politicians built the place, like cowboys built the rodeo, and clowns built the circus. It is the music they dance to. It is the bounce in their step. The twinkle in their eye. The slap on their backs. It is the blood in their veins, and the drop of vermouth in their gin. And everyone knows it.
Both political parties in both houses of the legislature are guilty of these time-honored political practices. Throughout the state’s history, legislative workers and their political bosses have engaged in opposition research; combing through nominating petitions for errors or fraud; disqualifications of nettlesome candidates; organizing the troops back home; strategizing; criticizing; cursing; pushing a partisan agenda; seeking a job and hiring a worker.
Most if not all come to work with some election or other on their minds.
The Harrisburg Patriot-News itself timidly waited a good while to acknowledge this reality. It seemed instead to attempt to lay blame by degrees.
“Corbett, a Republican, has vowed to examine all four legislative caucuses,” the newspaper reported on December 28, 2007, at the end of the first year of fear, loathing and hair-splitting. “But the probe has focused most publicly on House Democrats, whose bonus payments surged from $400,000 in 2005 to more than $1.8 million in 2006.
“House and Senate GOP staffers, by comparison, were paid bonuses totaling less than $500,000.”
Almost immediately, at the start of this witch-hunt in 2007, cries of foul went up from the Democratic caucus. Democrats complained that a partisan, elected Republican attorney general, obviously coveting the governor’s office, should not be allowed to conduct this overtly political investigation. Why not appoint a special prosecutor? Failing that, shouldn’t Corbett rule out running for governor?
Heedless, as always, of common sense warnings, Tom Corbett cynically proceeded to use an investigation about politics in state offices to launch his own political campaign for governor.
To win votes, Corbett would prosecute others who, he’d argue in court papers, should be jailed for doing what he was now doing: Using his office, its resources and its workers to get him elected to higher office.
Other problems became manifest. It was equally obvious that AG Corbett could not blaze a trail to the governor’s office, and win friends and influence voters, if he launched the torpedoes at his own party’s powerful legislative leadership caucuses, and their political supporters in the capitol, and back home.
So, naturally, it should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), prominent Republicans would have to be protected and shielded, even while AG Corbett’s political enemies in the legislature’s Democratic caucus went down with a thud.
The Patriot-News seemed to have had a tin ear to any complaints. The newspaper continued to push its story. It even seemed to be championing its champion, Tom Corbett, for the governor’s desk.
In Pennsylvania, backed by the deep pockets of the Newhouse clan, the Patriot was starting to look like the last dinosaur standing. The Patriot seemed suddenly powerful, at least compared to its tottering daily news counterparts in cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and nearby York, which were all threatening to go, or had already gone, belly up.
Already, in 2007, the unholy legislative bonus affair had been called by some unimaginative wag in a newsroom somewhere “Bonusgate.”
‘Tied together’
In November 2011, ironically, the Patriot would critically report in a headline that the fates of Jerry Sandusky’s Second Mile charity, and Penn State University, “were tied together.”
Just as accurately, the Patriot and Tom Corbett became tied together in the ongoing “Bonusgate” political fiasco. They would remain tied together, by necessity, in the Sandusky/PSU fiasco.
The Patriot-News had become joined at the hip with AG Tom Corbett, if not intentionally, certainly practically, and obviously. Bound together, like two escapees from a chain gang, they found themselves waist deep in The Big Muddy.
A good bit of this binding together included what we call today “access to power,” or “access journalism.” We kiss ass, we get access. We don’t kiss ass, we lose access. So we better continue to kiss Tom’s ass. This carries over today with the Patriot’s coverage of the Sandusky case, its fawning portrayal of Corbett’s continued bad acts in the mess, and the paper’s careless role in the rush to judgment against Coach Joe Paterno.
In this lamentable age of monopoly newspapers, a dangerous dynamic formed between the politically ambitious Republican attorney general and the Republican-leaning Patriot-News.
Too much power had been allowed to concentrate in too few places. It would end up destroying the state attorney general’s office. It would end up, ironically, contributing to the languishing non-investigation of Jerry Sandusky.
It may yet destroy Gov. Tom Corbett.
The Patriot, as far back as 2007, chose to report this growing controversy concerning Tom Corbett’s political misuse of the attorney general’s office, if it chose to report about it at all, as a problem of mere perception.
In the same December 2007 article mentioned above, the Patriot even published quotes suggesting that Corbett should somehow be perceived as a “corruption-busting” reformer. With this unhealthy concentration of power, a sort of Orwellian Newspeak was being born in Pennsylvania. Machine politicians abusing their offices were reformers. Bad was good. Up was down. Dissenting opinion was whining, and perhaps even criminal. A dangerous political game, based on unbridled access to unchecked power, was unfolding.
Playing to this perception game, Republican lawmakers were even allowed to wonder aloud in this article if they might be the next to be sacrificed. Forget facts, the law, fairness, and what’s best for Pennsylvania’s future.
“Republican leaders, meanwhile, fear Corbett might feel it necessary to take a GOP scalp to immunize himself against bias charges,” the Patriot reported.
And, “It really does ramp up his need to show the investigation was broad and the net was cast wide to show this was not a partisan crusade, but him (Corbett) doing his job as the chief law enforcement officer in the commonwealth,” a political science teacher was even allowed to opine about these perceptions.
All this, you’ll note, does not concern whether Tom Corbett was actually doing the right thing. It only concerns whether the public would perceive AG Corbett was doing the right thing.
There is a difference between the two.
What was missing from the Patriot’s non-critical and shallow self-examination was a serious critique of growing and obvious structural problems in Pennsylvania government. Also missing was a soul-searching look at our politics, and how, and whether, our system of politics should be changed.
The ignored abstract questions include: Should the state attorney general be elected? Should an elected attorney general, in the midst of a political corruption investigation, be allowed to run for governor? Should there be a period of time -- say, four to eight years -- when an attorney general is disqualified by law from running for governor? Wouldn’t an independent prosecutor better and more fairly handle this investigation?
But there are harder abstract questions. How does our political system really work? Is there a reason it works like this? What are the alternatives? Will those untried alternatives actually work? For example, we’ve heard calls for term limitations of
elected officials. But recent events in Washington show us the dangers of running a government of amateurs, musicians, soap opera stars, carnival barkers and political science professors. Do we really want to outlaw those old-time smoothie political horse traders and arm twisters who know their way around a capitol? Do we really want to end earmarks? How can a congressman, a senator, or a president horse trade with nothing? WWLJS: What Would Lyndon Johnson Say?
In politics, to the victor go the spoils. When there are no spoils, what will be the carrots and sticks to move the horse and wagon, to get things done around the common weal?
The Patriot as well ignored a soul-searching self-examination of its proper role as a publisher, and the proper role of its writers in our American society.
Should a newspaper merely be a one-sided cheerleader for a politician or a prosecutor? Should a newspaper, or a writer, be about throwing light, or throwing people in jail?
Should a writer, a publication, or a blog, attempt to illuminate what’s going on, to seek fairness, to ask questions about how our government functions, and suggest alternatives?
Political prosecutions race forward while pedophile case stalls
Former House Democrat Majority Whip Mike Veon was among the first to go down in a “Bonusgate” conviction, in March 2010. Veon’s conviction came just as primary voters were being asked to vote for Tom Corbett in the gubernatorial primary.
As strange luck would have it, in late 2009, I stopped into a Harrisburg convenience store and spotted, standing in line, waiting to check out, Mike Veon. I recognized him from his perp walk photos in the Patriot-News. His neatly trimmed moustache and beard made him hard to misidentify. We struck up a conversation. He was aware of some of my writings, and some of my family. We agreed to meet and talk.
JoePa Takes the Fall Page 2