Those Racy Emails: What They’re Saying
Kathleen Kane. AP Photo | Bradley C. Bower
Note: This post contains mildly detailed descriptions of the racy emails shared by state officials.
Attorney General Kathleen Kane took the lid off a burgeoning scandal Thursday, revealing the names of eight state officials who allegedly sent and/or received naughty emails on state government computers — and showing reporters some of the images those officials shared with each other.
The Inquirer gets down to business:
The e-mails include photos and videos of women and men engaged in oral sex, anal sex, and intercourse. The videos have titles such as “Cigar,” “Chin strap,” “Golf Ball washer,” and “Rocking Horse.” The photographs included naked women and motivational posters, with slogans such as “Devotion” and “Willingness,” that depicted women performing sex acts on their male bosses.
Yikes! Who would be trading those kinds of images on the public’s time and dime? Well it happened in then-Attorney General Tom Corbett’s office — though officials say Corbett didn’t send or receive any of the emails. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette offers details from the press briefing:
The agent clicked through Powerpoint slideshows depicting nude women and said they had been found in the accounts of former Corbett spokesman Kevin Harley, former deputy attorney general Patrick Blessington and former executive deputy attorney general Richard Sheetz.
The agent then played videos showing adult women, and sometimes men, engaged in various sexual acts. These, he said, had been found in the email accounts of Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Christopher Abruzzo, State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan, former Secretary of Legislative Affairs Christopher Carusone, state Board of Probation and Parole member Randy Feathers and former environmental prosecutor Glenn Parno.
The paper added: “In a statement released through the Board of Probation and Parole, Mr. Feathers said: ‘The images that were released to reporters today are not a reflection of my professional behavior and I don’t condone this activity.’ The others could not be reached for comment.”
Noonan received 338 pornographic emails and sent none, and Abruzzo received 46 and sent eight, Kane’s office said. Noonan was the office’s chief of criminal investigations, and Abruzzo formerly supervised the attorney general’s drug strike force section.
The man who sent more than three dozen porn emails and received 436 was identified as Randy Feathers, a former agent Corbett appointed to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.
The Patriot-News says, yes, all of this was against the rules:
Circulating sexually suggestive emails has been among the prohibited uses of information technology systems in the attorney general’s office’s “appropriate use of computer resources” policy since at least November 2006.
A copy of the policy in effect when pornographic emails were circulated on work computers in that office said violations of the policy were subject to corrective action, “including possible termination of employment, legal action and criminal liability.”
What will be the fallout? We’ll see in coming days.
