HARRISBURG — Some of the pornographic e-mails that were exchanged among state government officials in a scandal that has claimed some of their jobs involved children and violent sexual acts against women, the state attorney general said Tuesday.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane said in an interview televised Tuesday night on CNN the images are “deplorable.”

“When I saw them they literally took my breath away,” Kane said. “And they are deplorable: hard-core, graphic, sometimes violent e-mails that had a string of videos and pictures depicting sometimes children, old women. Some of them involved violent sexual acts against women.”

Kane, a Democrat, said a court order is preventing her from investigating them or explaining why. The court order stems from an investigation by a special prosecutor into whether Kane’s office breached grand jury secrecy when it gave documents about a 2009 investigation to the Philadelphia Daily News.

Kane did not describe the material involving children and violent sexual acts against women or say who exchanged it, and she was not asked in the interview to elaborate on it. In any case, no one who has viewed the e-mails has described them as having involved child pornography.

One of Kane’s lawyers in the case, Lanny Davis, said he had not seen all of the e-mails involved, and he was not sure to what Kane was referring. But, he said two images he saw of children were inappropriate but not necessarily child pornography.