Josh Shapiro focused on being Pa. attorney general, not what’s next

By Megan Guza
TribLive.com
November 23, 2019

https://triblive.com/local/regional/josh-shapiro-stays-focused-on-being-pa-attorney-general-not-whats-next/

Don’t ask Josh Shapiro what’s next. There’s work to do right now.

Shapiro, three years into his first term as Pennsylvania attorney general, has risen in profile since taking office. That’s due in no small part to the explosive 2018 grand jury report accusing a half-dozen Catholic dioceses across the state, including the ones in Pittsburgh and Greensburg, of covering up decades of child sexual abuse by priests.

In that regard, there is more to do. The abuse hotline set up in the aftermath of the report has gotten nearly 2,000 reports in just over a year. Those must be investigated.

He’s also in the process of hammering out a $50 billion settlement with Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of OxyContin, following a two-year investigation by Shapiro and attorneys general from three other states.

In the meantime, thousands continue to die of drug overdoses across Pennsylvania. There is more to do, he said.

Seniors are still being scammed. Students have lost money to predatory for-profit colleges. There are still fraudsters and predators and drug dealers.

So don’t ask the attorney general what’s next – it visibly annoys him.

“Look. If you can’t tell, we’re pretty busy, and I really love this work,” Shapiro told the Tribune-Review.

His sights are on re-election, though he’s made no official announcements before getting clearance from his wife and kids.

“I’m going to do what I’ve done every year at the end of the year: Sit down with Lori and my four kids and make an assessment about the future,” Shapiro said. “I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to tell you that my immediate future involves running for re-election next year.”

Just because he isn’t talking about his future aspirations, however, doesn’t mean others aren’t.

“Most of us have thought for some time that he was going on to higher office,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster. “Obviously, the governor’s office is the most likely.”

Madonna, who in 1992 founded a statewide political poll known now as the Franklin & Marshall College Poll, said Shapiro might be tight-lipped about the future, but most politicos thinks there’s little chance he doesn’t run for the state helm.

“Bottom line, that’s the office that most of us – most people who follow his career – believe is the office that he covets,” Madonna said. Pennsylvania governors are limited to two consecutive terms. Gov. Tom Wolf’s second term ends in 2022.

Shapiro turned down a run for the U.S. Senate once already. In 2015, he said, leaders in the Democratic Party approached him with the notion of running.

His last conversation before any decision is with his wife, with whom he’s been partnered since the ninth grade.

When they talked about a run for Senate, “Lori asked a pretty simple question: ‘Why do you want to do that job?’ And at the end of the day, the answer is I didn’t want to do that job, I wanted to do this job.”

Taking a tarnished office

Shapiro was already behind the eight ball when he began the job in January 2017.

His predecessor, Kathleen Kane, resigned in 2016 after she was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and other charges related to leaking grand jury information to Philadelphia reporters.

Kane was the first Democrat elected to the office since Pennsylvania made attorney general an elective office in 1980. Shapiro is the second.

He said he worked hard to rebuild the office and its reputation that was marred by the scandal that began in 2014, two years before Kane was convicted and four years before she began an eight-month prison sentence.

He said he’s regained the trust of law enforcement statewide, citing a 39% increase in referrals from agencies, and said that he has tried to move the office away from politics.

“It goes back to the rebuilding,” he said. “People have to have faith in the decisions that are made by the chief law enforcement officer of the commonwealth. They don’t have to agree with the decisions, they don’t have to like the decisions – I certainly can’t please all the people all the time. But if people have faith that we’re making decisions for just and right reasons, that’s the goal.”

He prefers meeting his staff around a conference table rather than sending emails, and he likes when they disagree with him.

“I really enjoy having folks on my team tell me straight-up that we disagree,” he said. “I really enjoy that back and forth, and I don’t have people around me who just echo my sentiments and amplify my voice at the table.”

Also simmering when he took office was the grand jury investigation into Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania. Because of the grand jury’s secrecy, Shapiro was unaware of its existence when he took office.

The state was only a year removed from the 2016 grand jury investigation into the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, which revealed decades of abuse by priests.

Informed of the latest investigation, and given the choice of allowing it to continue or calling it off, Shapiro opted to see what was there.

What was there was a cover-up stretching back decades, protecting hundreds of predator priests who abused thousands of victims. Attorneys general in 21 other states have now started their own investigations into the church, and Shapiro said he has had a conversation with the U.S. Department of Justice.

While he insists none of it is about him but rather about the survivors, he acknowledges that it was a lonely year and a half to get to that point. “I was in the grand jury, so I couldn’t talk to anybody about it,” he said. “I couldn’t talk to my wife about it. That was really hard.”

It did affect him, he said. He vacillated between being distant in his own home and smothering his children with protection and affection.

Either way, it was impossible not to take the work home with him. That applies to most of what he does, he said.

“I am not someone who can just shut it off, so I wear the emotions of the people I fight for every day,” he said. “The mom who wraps her arms around me crying because her son died of an opioid overdose because she took him to the doctor because of a sports injury at school.”

The examples, he said, are unending.

“The survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a priest who breaks down crying and just wants you to know their truth — you wear all of that.”

Washington education

After graduating from college in 1995, Shapiro learned Washington’s ways with a series of Capitol Hill jobs. His career began in earnest with U.S. Rep. Joe Hoeffel, a Montgomery County Democrat elected in 1998. Shapiro served as the congressman’s legislative director and was soon promoted to chief of staff, making him the youngest on Capitol Hill to hold the title. He was 25.

“Josh was and is very smart, very capable, very ambitious – like most politicians are,” Hoeffel said. “And that’s not a criticism.”

When Hoeffel decided to run for U.S. Senate in 2003, he said Shapiro tossed around the idea of running for Hoeffel’s seat in the House. He said Shapiro has always been politically ambitious.

“Totally,” he said. “It didn’t surprise me when he told me he was leaving my staff to move back to [Pennsylvania] to start his legal career, because part of that move was to begin his political career.”

Shapiro’s move back to Pennsylvania was exactly that: He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2004, winning another three terms before leaving in 2011 to run for a seat as a county commissioner in Montgomery County, where he lives. In the 2018 race for attorney general, he had the endorsement of President Barack Obama.

Hoeffel said he’s aware of the prevailing rumor that Shapiro has his sights set on the governor’s office, and he thinks that’s probably the likely scenario in three years.

“He’s tackled some high-profile things, which requires some courage on his part,” he said.

Those high-profile cases — suing the federal government when he believes policies will harm his constituents, bridging the wide rift between UPMC and Highmark, tracing a cover-up back to the Vatican — they’re the ones that make headlines, Shapiro said. They’re important work, but some of the most important cases go unnoticed.

“Every day we get money back for consumers who get scammed – seniors in particular,” he said. “I think that’s a really big deal.”

He pointed to $51 million in loan forgiveness secured for students scammed by for-profit colleges, plus the $15 million his office has gotten back for residents who were scammed, whether over the phone or by a roofer who never delivers a new roof he was paid for.

“It may only be a few hundred bucks, a few thousand bucks for one consumer, so it might not garner the attention of the media, but for that person – it’s a lot of money,” he said. “Someone’s out there fighting for them and looking out for them in the process.”

And, for now, Shapiro says that’s what his work is: helping victims. He thinks his position as attorney general allows him the opportunity to do that work without the red tape of the legislative process.

That’s the process he’d be caught up in if he were, say, a member of the U.S. Senate.

“You get to see a problem and do something about it,” Shapiro said. “Unlike the legislative process – which is just so slow and oftentimes grinds to a halt and people just utter talking points all day and don’t really accomplish anything – this job is something where you can have a tangible effect on a problem.”