Is Gov Corbett serious? Instead of proctecting children, he, as the state attorney general, turned his back to run for governor?
How does he sleep?
Abuse Inquiry Set Tricky Path for a Governor
By JO BECKER
Published: November 10, 2011
For months, Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania had reason to suspect a sexual abuse scandal was going to explode at Penn State University. He also had no way to talk about it, or to prepare for it.
Mr. Corbett, as state attorney general, had begun an investigation in 2009 into allegations that a former Penn State assistant football coach had abused young boys, and that university officials might have covered up the scandal. He had convened a grand jury, and his prosecutors had taken testimony.
But when he ran for governor, and even after he took office, he was obligated to keep the investigation secret, even as he saw the university officials at the center of the investigation doing little to address the substance of the inquiry.
That day came last Friday, when the charges became public against the former coach, Jerry Sandusky, and two senior university officials. Suddenly, though, Mr. Corbett faced a new challenge: as governor, he was effectively a member of Penn State’s board of trustees, the body that would decide how to handle the crisis, when to act and who, if anyone, to fire. But he also knew information about the investigation that he could not share with anyone, including other trustees, and was still bound by rules prohibiting prosecutors from making possibly prejudicial statements.
Over the next four days, then, Mr. Corbett, a Republican, kept his public statements spare, calling on trustees to act quickly and aggressively. But privately, he worked to move the board in what he believed was the right direction. He called multiple members, including Vice Chairman John P. Surma, the chief executive of U.S. Steel, and told them that the country was watching, that a change at the top was needed and that the issue was about more than a football program, according to a person with knowledge of his efforts.
Mr. Corbett eventually decided to send a public signal: he formally announced he would attend the scheduled meeting of the trustees on Friday, something he had never done before.
“It was indicative of him putting a thumb on the scale,” said a person with direct knowledge of the governor’s deliberations.
Frank Noonan, the commissioner of the state police, said: “You couldn’t have kept him away from that meeting with a troop of marines. He has very strong feelings about this case.”
At an emergency meeting on Wednesday night, the board removed both the university president, Graham B. Spanier, and Joe Paterno, the football coach. Afterward, the trustees said they had acted independently. But they conceded, without being specific, that the board had received some unsolicited encouragement about what action to take.
Thursday evening, Mr. Corbett addressed reporters in State College, Pa. “Their actions caused me to not have confidence in their ability to lead,” he said of Mr. Spanier and Mr. Paterno.
Raised in blue-collar Shaler, Pa., a town of 28,000 where a high school football game is a major event, Mr. Corbett spent most of his career as a prosecutor. A Roman Catholic, he was struck early on in the Penn State investigation by the similarities between the university’s failure to report allegations of sexual abuse involving Mr. Sandusky and the church’s failure to report pedophile priests, according to several people who work with him.
The Penn State case also had echoes of a prosecution Mr. Corbett had led as a young assistant district attorney. Mr. Sandusky is alleged to have used a foundation he created for disadvantaged children, called the Second Mile, to prey upon young boys. In the case earlier in Mr. Corbett’s career, he prosecuted a serial pedophile who ran a club for troubled children called the Children of the Wind.
In 2004, Mr. Corbett was elected attorney general, and quickly created a special unit to investigate child predators. He privately cited the Children of the Wind victims as the reason, saying he remained haunted by victims in the case, Mr. Harley recalled.
Once he became the state’s top prosecutor, Mr. Corbett did not shy from politically difficult cases, beginning a corruption inquiry that uncovered misuse of state funds on a grand scale by Democrats and Republicans.
for complete:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/sports/ncaafootball/tom-corbett-pennsylvania-governor-couldnt-discuss-inquiry.html?_r=1&hp
| 
