DOUBLETHINK

“There was never a Bonusgate leak investigation because there were no leaks - or until you wrote about it yesterday - any allegation that the AG’s office leaked information.” -- Keven Harley, spokesman for Governor Tom Corbett, in an email to Capitolwire's Pete DeCoursey.

Pete Decoursey went on to eviscerate Harley's bogus claim in a July 23rd column  (subscription required). But the fact that it even occurs to Harley to spew such obvious nonsense is evidence of Corbett's clear confidence that his word is unlikely to be questioned.

Anyone who paid attention to the media coverage of Corbett's partisan propaganda exercise known as "Bonusgate" knows the grand jury leaked like a sieve. 

CasablancaPA documented more than a dozen leaks to former Post-Gazette reporter, now high-ranking Corbett aide (what a coincidence!) Dennis Roddy, alone. Harley's straight-faced claim "there were no leaks" is a breathtakingly bold lie.

Harley claims as fact that none of those ....  whatever he wants to call them, since "there were no leaks" - came from the Attorney General's office. How does he know? He doesn't, because no one ever tried to find out where they came from. And why didn't then-Attorney General Tom Corbett - who, DeCoursey noted, "is death on leaks" and "says often the letter of the rules must be followed" on grand jury secrecy - ever try to find out who was leaking grand jury information?

Apparently because  -- despite the repeated and constant publication of intimate details from a grand jury -- no one ever claimed there were leaks.

Harley called on DeCoursey to "Name the leaks [Pssst! Over here!] and prove the attribution or back off that one.”

"I not only believe it to be true, I have multiple sources over the years from your past and present colleagues who said it to me," DeCoursey responded. "I stand by what I wrote.”

The question of whether the observations of convicts  (or anonymous bloggers) are "b.s." in this case may be irrelevant, since DeCoursey - who is not a convicted criminal , as far as we know (though we suppose he could be an anonymous blogger;  we never issued a subpoena to find out) - makes the same observation. And while we commend DeCoursey for practicing actual journalism in the face of obvious lies from Corbett's office, Harley's audacity is the direct result of getting away with lying far too often, for far too long.