More trouble loomed for Kline from the media, specifically KCTV 5, the CBS affiliate in suburban Kansas City.  The station took its lead from the Kansas City Star and went after the severely bloodied Kline as mindlessly as a shark.  The KCTV-5 staff spent nine months tracking Kline and waited for sweeps week in late November 2007 to share its much-anticipated findings.

Except that there was nothing to share. Okay, although Kline did have a “residence” in Johnson County, where he spent several nights a week, he and his wife kept a home 40 minutes away in Topeka, the state capital, so their daughter did not have to switch high schools. Kline freely admitted as much. And that was about it. Kline had only a year left as DA, and he had no intention of running again.

To get this information KCTV-5 crews stalked Kline, his family and his neighbors for months. The hidden-camera video of Kline’s wife picking up the couple’s daughter from school unnerved just about everyone who saw it.  Even the dependably anti-Kline alternative newspaper, the Pitch, called the KCTV-5 presentation “creepy.” So creepy and pointless was the series, in fact, that ordinary citizens began to sense the depth of the media bias against Kline and what he represented.

As it turned out, the stalking time could have been more profitably spent on Morrison. The Topeka Capital-Journal soon revealed that the attorney general had been carrying on a two-year affair with a subordinate, who was now claiming sexual harassment.  The affair had begun a month before Morrison had launched his campaign for attorney general with a photo spread of the happy Morrison family in front of the Catholic Church they attended.

That was just the half of it. The woman, Linda Carter, remained in the employ of the Johnson County District Attorney’s office after Kline had taken over Morrison’s job.  Carter claimed that Morrison had used the affair to coerce her into securing sensitive information about Kline’s investigation into Planned Parenthood.

Although conceding the affair, Morrison denied the allegation of coercion, but no one much believed him about anything anymore.  To stem the bleeding, Sebelius and friends leaned on Morrison to resign, and this he grudgingly agreed to do. 

The following month, January 2008, the moderate establishment took another blow.  Judge Anderson testified in an open Johnson County courtroom that Kline did, in fact, have probable cause to believe that Planned Parenthood had fabricated its records. 

On paper Kline’s charges against Planned Parenthood may have sounded merely technical: making a false writing, failure to maintain records, failure to determine viability, but after Anderson’s testimony, these charges began to take on life.

Despite Planned Parenthood’s repeated public claims that its clinic did not perform any abortions past the 22nd week of pregnancy, this preliminary hearing suggested that they had done so in at least 23 different cases in one year.  More troubling, the records Kline had subpoenaed showed that these late-term abortions had been performed without any documentation of either non-viability or maternal harm.

On January 31, 2008 Paul Morrison officially stepped down, and Stephen Six, son of former Kansas Supreme Court Justice Fred Six, was sworn in as attorney general. Sebelius had appointed the 42 year-old Democrat to a judgeship three years prior to handing him the AG’s job.  No matter how much he had been told, Six could not have known how explosive a minefield he was about to enter.

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