HARRISBURG (AP) - Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has succeeded in ousting a state judge who specialized in overseeing secret, statewide grand jury investigations, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday.
The state Supreme Court sided with Kane in May in her effort to remove Barry Feudale, 67, of Coal Township, from the position, the Inquirer reported. The proceedings were kept under seal and the Inquirer did not say how it learned about it.
However, the newspaper report said Kane made the move after discovering an email Feudale had sent to a former top state prosecutor criticizing both Kane and her predecessor, Linda Kelly.
Kane also told the court about an incident involving a knife, something Feudale says was taken out of context when he stopped by her offices and showed a secretary a 10-inch Gurkha dagger he keeps in his office.
Asked about the allegations, Feudale called them "a sneak attack" that had twisted the facts.
According to Inquirer, the dispute features strong personalities. Feudale is a hiker, climber and kayaker, is fond of flying his Cessna to county courthouses across the state and is "blunt-spoken on and off the bench," the newspaper states.
The Inquirer report said that the dispute that resulted in Feudale's removal is part of a larger battle between the newly elected attorney general, a Democrat, and the entrenched state prosecutors who had worked in the office under Republicans, who had controlled it for decades up until January.
Feudale has overseen grand juries in some of the attorney general's office's biggest cases, including the recent corruption scandal in the Legislature and the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse case at Penn State.
'Political intent'
Feudale sent the email to Frank Fina, a onetime top prosecutor who has since left for the Philadelphia district attorney's office after building many of the attorney general office's biggest cases.
In it, he wrote: "The Last General aka 'Private' Kelly, could not lead and was indecisive to the point that she was almost ineffective."
The judge also disparaged an inquiry Kane has launched into how the attorney general's office pursued the Sandusky case, a promise on which Kane campaigned.
The inquiry, he wrote, was "PATENT in its POLITICAL intent," but he advised Fina, who led the Sandusky investigation, to cooperate with it. The email was among the items Feudale gave to the former Philadelphia federal prosecutor, H. Geoffrey Moulton Jr., who is leading the review of the Sandusky investigation.
Feudale expressed regret about his criticism of Kelly, calling it a cheap shot, the Inquirer reported. However, he did not back off his criticism of Kane.
"Kane is a politician first, second, and third, and perhaps an AG ... fourth and fifth," he told the Inquirer.
Kane's communications director, Joe Peters, rejected the criticism.
"She's attorney general, first and only," Peters said.
Feudale said the knife incident was distorted and that he had been branded as "some wingnut with a Gurkha knife." According to Feudale, he had kept the knife in his office as a conversation starter and was taking it home when he stopped at Kane's office to ask about a new filing in the Penn State cases.
While there, he showed a secretary the knife, and teased her about how he slipped it through the office's security apparatus, he said.
A Democrat, Feudale was a Northumberland County judge from 1987 to 1997. He worked as a "floating" senior judge, assigned by the Supreme Court to hear cases in 63 of the state's 67 counties.
He has been appointed to preside over a series of investigating grand juries by chief justices over the past 12 years.