HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A report released Monday detailing the handling of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case faults police and prosecutors for long delays in bringing charges but found no evidence that politics affected the investigation. 
 
 In this Tuesday, May 20, 2014 photo, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett talks to reporters outside his polling place at the Shaler Villa Volunteer Fire Company after voting in the Pennsylvania primary election... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this June 22, 2012, file photo, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky arrives at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte, Pa. New details about the scope and pace of Sandusky's... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Thursday, July 11, 2013, file photo, Pennsylvania Attorney Gen. Kathleen Kane speaks during a news conference at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia. Kane is preparing to... (Associated Press) 
 
 The report, commissioned by Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane and written by former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton, blamed a three-year time lapse in filing charges on communication problems, an expungement of a 1998 complaint about the former Penn State coach and a failure to take certain investigative steps early on. 
 
 "The facts show an inexcusable lack of urgency in charging and stopping a serial sexual predator," said Kane, who had vowed to conduct a review of the investigation while running for office. "The report documents that more investigative work took place in just one month in 2011 than in all of either 2009 or 2010." 
 
 Moulton said his review, including internal emails by state prosecutors, "revealed no direct evidence that electoral politics influenced any important decision made in the Sandusky investigation." 
 
 Then-Attorney General Tom Corbett, a Republican, was in the midst of his successful 2010 gubernatorial campaign during the Sandusky investigation. 
 
 As a candidate in 2012, Kane said that Corbett may have had a political motive to slow down the investigation, an assertion Corbett has denied. The arrest of Sandusky led to the firing of longtime Penn State coach Joe Paterno while Corbett was serving as a university trustee; Penn State alumni and fans have objected to how Paterno was treated. 
 
 Corbett spokesman Jay Pagni said Monday that the investigation was conducted with the victims at the forefront. 
 
 "It was a thorough, thoughtful investigation, and in the end a child predator can no longer victimize anyone," Pagni said. 
 
 Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 boys and is serving decades in prison sentence. 
 
 The report said the lead prosecutor at the time, Jonelle Eshbach, hectored her bosses about the case during a stretch in 2010 when the probe was largely dormant. 
 
 Eshbach drafted a grand jury report in March 2010 based on the claims of a lone victim, but she spent much of the ensuing months — as Corbett won the primary — trying to get approval for the report. 
 
 "In the interim, no witnesses were interviewed, no witnesses testified in the grand jury and no grand jury subpoenas were issued," Moulton wrote. He said the basis for that decision was that one accuser's testimony wouldn't be enough to convict Sandusky and an acquittal would make it harder to file more charges later. 
 
 According to the report, prosecutors told Moulton they waited until 2011 to search Sandusky's home computer and subpoena child protective services records because they "believed that they were unlikely to be productive and would have risked publicly revealing the existence of the investigation." 
 
 Two days after Corbett was elected governor in November 2010, the Centre County prosecutor received an anonymous tip directing investigators to assistant football coach Mike McQueary, whose testimony would eventually help convict Sandusky. 
 
 The investigation picked up steam after that, and authorities subpoenaed key figures at Penn State, including Paterno, vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley. Additional victims were identified, and on June 21, 2011, Sandusky's home was searched, producing photos and typewritten lists of children who participated in events at Sandusky's charity, The Second Mile, with some names highlighted. 
 
 More resources early on, including additional investigators, may not have speeded up the case, Moulton said, because the best leads in 2010 and early 2011 were not related to how many detectives were devoted to the matter. 
 
 He said decisions not to bring charges based solely on one accuser or, in June 2011, after three more witnesses had testified before a grand jury, "fit within acceptable bounds of prosecutorial discretion." 
 
 Moulton noted that if authorities had put together a broad-based team early on, it's possible someone may have known about or turned up a 1998 police investigation of Sandusky prompted by a mother's complaint that the coach had showered with her son. That report had been expunged, one reason for the lengthy investigation, he said. 
 
 Corbett said "electoral politics did not enter his thinking in any way," Moulton wrote, concluding the campaign donations Corbett received from people associated with The Second Mile does not appear to have affected the investigation. 
 
 The report does not go into depth about actions at Penn State, where three former administrators await trial on charges they participated in a criminal cover-up of complaints about Sandusky. The university eventually accepted a set of penalties from the NCAA over its handling of the matter, including a four-year bowl ban, a temporary reduction in football scholarships, the loss of 112 wins from Paterno's later years and a $60 million fine. ||||| A report into the three-year investigation of serial sex abuser Jerry Sandusky found that prosecutors, facing a shaky initial witness, had reason to take their time to build a case with multiple victims, according to sources familiar with the document. Though raising questions about delays in the inquiry, the report, scheduled to be released Monday, does not fault prosecutors for using a grand jury to investigate Sandusky, the sources said. It also found no evidence that politics or a lack of resources influenced the investigation. The report notes prosecutors from the state Attorney General's Office felt strongly that testimony from the first boy to accuse Sandusky would likely not have been enough to convict the former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University. It does question some decisions along the way. For instance, it notes that prosecutors took too long to take certain investigative steps, including gathering reports on Sandusky from other law enforcement agencies, the sources said. 
 
 The report was commissioned and will be released by Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane, who was elected in 2012 largely on a campaign that questioned whether one of her predecessors in the job, Gov. Corbett, deliberately slowed the investigation for political purposes. 
 
 In her bid for office, Kane said, "Instead of using a grand jury in the Jerry Sandusky case, I would have had him arrested after the first victims came forward." 
 
 Kane, a Democrat, suggested that Corbett, a Republican, delayed the probe to avoid angering voters and donors. Politics, she told the editorial board of one newspaper, "probably" drove his decisions. 
 
 "You don't put a case like that before the grand jury," she said. "That was the leadership. Somebody made that decision that they're going to drag that out." 
 
 However, the review by former federal prosecutor Geoffrey Moulton concludes it was reasonable for prosecutors to build a case with many victims, the sources said. The Moulton report notes that the first victim to come forward had difficulty talking about his abuse, to police or a grand jury, and would often give only one-word replies when questioned about Sandusky's attacks. 
 
 A spokesman for Kane on Sunday night said she would have no comment before her news conference Monday. 
 
 As for Corbett, Moulton's review of the prosecutors who worked for him - as well as of tens of thousands of e-mails they exchanged during the investigation - turned up no evidence that "electoral politics" played a role in the case. Corbett's critics have suggested he might have delayed such a controversial investigation because he was running for the state's highest office at the time. 
 
 The sources said Moulton also concluded neither Corbett nor any of his senior aides told prosecutors how to conduct the investigation. 
 
 The Moulton study does question aspects of the case, according to the sources. It identifies several months in 2010 when the inquiry appeared to have ground to a halt. 
 
 Moulton also faulted prosecutors for waiting too long to ask Penn State to turn over any records containing complaints against Sandusky. The key subpoena to the university was not issued until December 2010 - 21 months after the attorney general obtained the case. State investigators also did not visit local and university police to search for Sandusky-related records until January 2011, a step that turned up four more victims. 
 
 Moulton reportedly also faulted prosecutors for waiting until June 2011 to search Sandusky's house. In rebuttal, the sources said, prosecutors said that for months, they lacked evidence for a search warrant. There was also worry that a search, if publicized, would reveal the open investigation. 
 
 The search of the house turned up photographs of Sandusky's victims, as well as a typed list of children's names - some with asterisks next to them. One of those highlighted was a victim prosecutors did not know about at the time. 
 
 Sandusky, for years a top assistant to Joe Paterno, is serving 30 to 60 years in prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting 10 boys. Former Penn State president Graham B. Spanier and two other former ranking administrators await trial on accusations that they covered up Sandusky's conduct. 
 
 In a timeline Moulton explored in his report, the Sandusky case began in 2008, when a teenage boy told school officials in Clinton County that Sandusky had molested him. Sandusky was not charged until November 2011. 
 
 In 2008, social workers found the complaint credible, but the case soon got bogged down in jurisdictional issues. Though the victim attended school in Clinton County, most of the wrongdoing took place in neighboring Centre County, home of Penn State. 
 
 Finally, five months after the victim first spoke out, the case was handed off to state prosecutors. 
 
 In a missed opportunity, the report says, according to one source, social workers early on conducted what turned out to be the only official interview of Sandusky - but without police or prosecutors. 
 
 Once the Attorney General's Office took up the case in March 2009, the assigned prosecutor, Jonelle Eshbach, and her supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Frank G. Fina, agreed to use a grand jury to investigate further. Eshbach believed that the first victim's account needed corroboration and that there were more victims to be found, the sources said she told Moulton. 
 
 Fina stressed the secret nature of a grand jury investigation, saying it would give fearful witnesses and victims protection to testify confidentially against such a prominent community figure as Sandusky. 
 
 Once the grand jury turned up evidence to buttress the first victim's account, Eshbach wanted to arrest Sandusky, the sources said Moulton learned. 
 
 However, the report says, proceeding with an arrest had its own risks – notably, that an acquittal as the result of a weak and thin case would have put a halt to more victims surfacing. And though sex criminals are thought to be obsessive, Sandusky was aware he was under law enforcement scrutiny, the report noted. 
 
 The sources said the report takes pains to account for the perspectives of the prosecutors who brought the case and those who criticized it, and recommends ways to improve the process. 
 
 The report will be closely read in political and legal circles. A scathing report that faulted Corbett, who faces a difficult reelection battle in the fall, could have damaged his chances for a second term. 
 
 acouloumbis@phillynews.com 
 
 717-787-5934 
 
 @AngelasInk
– A new report on the child-molestation investigation of Jerry Sandusky reveals "an inexcusable lack of urgency in charging and stopping a serial sexual predator," says Pennsylvania attorney general Kathleen Kane, who commissioned the report. Delays weren't, however, due to political concerns, the report finds. Kane had previously suggested that now-governor Tom Corbett's gubernatorial campaign might have slowed the process; concerns about the case were at the center of her own campaign, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Corbett was a trustee of Penn State, where Sandusky was a former coach. Had the new report seen politics at play, it could have posed a threat to his re-election campaign, the Inquirer notes. Still, "the report documents that more investigative work took place in just one month in 2011 than in all of either 2009 or 2010," Kane notes, per the AP. In 2010, the lead prosecutor drafted a grand jury report, but she struggled to get it approved. That report was based on a single victim's claims—likely not enough to get Sandusky convicted, says former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton, who wrote the new report on the investigation. Police delayed searching Sandusky's home because they thought "they were unlikely to be productive and would have risked publicly revealing the existence of the investigation," the report says. Had the initial team of investigators been larger, however, they might have noticed a 1998 complaint about Sandusky showering with a child, Moulton said.