Sandusky charity faced contempt motion over missing records

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By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

Pennsylvania state prosecutors filed a secret motion to hold The Second Mile children’s charity in contempt in July after the organization failed to turn over expense records of founder Jerry Sandusky in response to a grand jury subpoena, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

The contempt motion, filed under court seal, was withdrawn in October after some of the  missing Sandusky records were found and produced, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the charity’s new lawyers are still looking for the rest of the subpoenaed material and seeking to determine whether the missing records were destroyed or removed in an effort to impede the investigation into Sandusky’s relationships with The Second Mile children, said the source, who has been briefed on some of the details of the investigation.

The move to hold The Second Mile in contempt, which has previously not been reported, is the latest indication that the investigation into the Penn State sex abuse scandal may have widened to include obstruction of justice. Asked Monday if obstruction was a focus of Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly’s investigation, her spokesman, Nils Frederickson, declined comment, citing rules covering the secrecy of matters before the grand jury. “This is a comprehensive, active and ongoing investigation,” he said.

The New York Times reported last week that some The Second Mile board members were alarmed to learn that Sandusky’s travel and expense records for the years 2000 and 2003 were missing from an off-site storage facility. The material had been subpoenaed by prosecutors in an effort to piece together which children in The Second Mile programs may have attracted Sandusky’s attention and received gifts or been taken on trips by him, the paper reported. The Times said that the expense reports  for one of those years had apparently been misfiled and were later located, but that the rest of material was still missing -- a development that one unnamed investigator was quoted as calling “suspicious.”

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