Alum Unveils Corbett’s Involvement in Freeh Selection for Investigation

Another victory in alumnus Ryan Bagwell’s quest to unveil documents related to the Sandusky scandal brings new information to the light.

It seems that former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s involvement goes deeper than urging the board to fire Joe Paterno, which ESPN the Magazine reported in 2012.

A court ruling forced the state’s Department of Education to turn over an e-mail exchange between Corbett’s Office of General Counsel and former trustee Ronald Tomalis to Bagwell and the Penn State Sunshine Fund, an organization that aims to unveil Sandusky-related documents. At the time, Tomalis was an employee of the education department. 

The exchange shows Corbett’s counsel, namely second-in-command James Schultz, recommending a list of three potential candidates to lead the university’s investigation into now-convicted child sex abuser Jerry Sandusky.

The list ranked former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff first, followed by Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who was eventually chosen. The third and final name on the list is Kevin O’Connor, a former Justice Department official.

“After internal deliberations, we find [those] individuals highly qualified to handle the representation,” Schultz says in the e-mail. 

Records obtained by Bagwell last year showed that the only two candidates interviewed by Tomalis and trustee Ken Frazier for the job were Chertoff and Freeh. While it appears that the e-mail from Corbett’s counsel was purely a recommendation, the board didn’t consider candidates outside of the governor’s short list. As Bagwell puts it, the candidates for Penn State’s internal investigation were “hand-picked” by Corbett.

“It’s hard to find a concrete link that the candidates were forced on the board, but the fact that the only two candidates they seriously considered were two of the three from Corbett’s list is fairly close,” Bagwell says. 

In addition to releasing the e-mail, Bagwell asserts that Tomalis perjured himself in the court process leading to the court’s decision to grant the right-to-know request. In a court filing, Tomalis attempted to block the e-mail’s release by claiming he never waived attorney-client privilege, which would make the exchange legally protected and confidential.

“It’s well known that if you disclose confidential or privileged information between you and an attorney to a third party, that results in a waiver,” Bagwell says. “It’s very clear from these e-mails that Tomalis knew and was aware that he forwarded these e-mails to a third party, therefore privilege was waived.”

What this means, in Bagwell’s opinion, is that Tomalis knowingly misled the court in the affidavit by claiming he never waived attorney-client privilege.

“To put in an affidavit that he didn’t waive the privilege is where he perjured himself,” Bagwell says. “When you sign an affidavit, you swear under the penalty of perjury that the stuff you said is true.”

Attempts to reach Tomalis for comment were unsuccessful. The state education department had no comment on the court’s ruling.

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