Will Bunch has a long memory for Pennsylvania politics, and in his latest post, he points out that the FBI finally had to come in to investigate the finances of a politically-connected cyber schools operator — whose activities were pretty much ignored in an investigation by then-Attorney General Tom Corbett (who’s now our Scott Walker clone of a wingnut governor). He’s also famous for taking three years before the state prosecutors finally brought charges against Jerry Sandusky.

If you’re a political junkie, you’ve probably heard of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. It figured prominently in a scandal that helped end the Senate career of Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum. It was the thriving online learning center — launched in a foundering ex-steel town on the Ohio border called Midland, Pa. — that was taking $38,000 a year from taxpayers in the blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills for the home-schooling of five of Santorum’s kids, who lived two states away in an affluent Virginia suburb.The arrangement made Santorum look bad (for one thing, he’d been elected to Congress in 1990 by attacking an incumbent… for moving to Virginia) but it also gave some folks pause about the millions of dollars that Pennsylvania was beginning to hurl into cyber-charter schools — schools that are getting the same public dollars as bricks-and-mortar charter schools, even through their cost of educating each child is much lower. But the flow of public cash to the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter empire founded by entreprenuer Nicholas Trombetta surged despite the bad publicity in the Santorum case, and despite news in 2007 that a state grand jury was probing the convoluted financial dealings of Trombetta, a GOP donor.Nothing ever came of that 2007 probe. You may have heard of the state’s attorney general back then, a chap by the name of Tom Corbett.By 2010, the massive flow of money to the Trombetta cyber-empire — which now included a baffling array of for-profit entities — began to draw notice. According to a report in Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the state….…. pays tens of millions of dollars a year to a network of nonprofit and for-profit companies run by former executives of the state’s largest online public school.The relationships between the Beaver County-based school and those businesses were a concern to former Gov. Ed Rendell’s administration, which late in its tenure asked PA Cyber for better accounting of its payments to spin-off entities. Gov. Corbett’s Department of Education, though, opted early on to let the relationships continue without heightened accountability.There’s that Corbett guy again! Anyway, someone has finally stepped in. Not the state of Pennsylvania, of course. The job fell instead to the feds:On Thursday agents from the FBI, the criminal investigations division of the IRS, and the U.S. Department of Education searched the school’s headquarters in Midland, its accountants’ office in Koppel, and properties rented by its spin-offs in Ohio.The investigation appears to be aimed at current or former executives of the school. PA Cyber “as an entity, is not a current target,” U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton’s office said. Regardless of the direction of the investigation, PA Cyber demonstrates a consequence of the state’s charter school revolution: the emergence from schools of profit-seeking spin-offs.This news come as a) evidence mounts that cyber-charters, in spite of — or maybe because of — their ability to generate profits, do a poor job of actually educating children (PDF) and b) the state of Pennsylvania is thus racing to apporve more cyber-charters.

Meanwhile, here’s another example of Corbett’s kid-glove handling of the politically connected, via CasablancaPA:

Here’s how tough and relentless Jonelle Eshbach was in getting to the truth:

“[The] state investigator was a fan: If that was the culture that permeated Penn State, could it have affected the investigation by state attorney general’s office? Jonelle Eshbach, the senior deputy attorney general who interviewed Paterno, several of Sandusky’s victims and Penn State officials when they appeared before the grand jury, has not been shy about her loyalty to the late coach. After Paterno’s divisive firing, her Facebook page showed she took a survey about the board’s decision. Her page says she answered that she would have let Paterno finish the 2011 season, then retire as he planned. Freeh’s team concluded that Paterno’s firing was warranted. Eshbach didn’t return a message at her office. Attorney general spokesman Nils Frederiksen declined to comment on it…When she interviewed Paterno, Eshbach specifically told him to explain what he knew about the McQueary incident, ‘without getting into any graphic detail.’ She also never followed up when Paterno hinted that something about an earlier claim might have been discussed in his presence prior to that. ‘You did mention — I think you said something about a rumor. It may have been discussed in my presence, something else about somebody,’ Paterno said at the grand jury. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. I could not honestly say I heard a rumor.’” (Patriot News 7/12/2012)

ESPN:

“While the current Sandusky investigation was in its second year, Corbett spent much of his time focusing on the sweeping public corruption inquiry of Democrats and Republicans in Harrisburg nicknamed “Bonusgate.” He also crisscrossed Pennsylvania campaigning for governor, pledging to cut runaway spending and ‘restore trust in Harrisburg.’ State campaign records show he accepted contributions of nearly $650,000 from current and past board members of Second Mile and their businesses.”

Looks like Mitt’s got some ‘splaining to do about Bain buying an abortion-disposal company!