The Many Sides of Eliot Spitzer

First, Scott Horton's post in today's The New Republic:
Spitz Out, by Scott Horton
Was the investigation of Eliot Spitzer politically motivated?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Monday a friend gave me a copy of a memorandum (pdf) that Attorney General Michael Mukasey had circulated inside the Justice Department admonishing staff about how to deal with politically sensitive cases. "They must be about to bag another big-time Democrat," my friend said, jokingly. Perhaps it wasn't a joke. Within hours the wires were burning with reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring.
[...] All of this makes for excellent copy, particularly for the cable news networks and other outlets that feed off just this sort of tale of personal fall. But there may well be a story-behind-the-story. How did the case against Spitzer get launched? Was he brought down by a politically motivated investigation?
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
[...] The story emerging around the fall of Eliot Spitzer suggests that the case did not start with the report of a crime. Rather it started with a decision to look into Spitzer and his financial dealings. In the course of an open-ended investigation, information about a prostitution circle surfaced. That looks abusive. An investigation like that provides no basis to acquit Spitzer. But it suggests that when his case is done, the public should be pressing some tough questions about why this investigation was launched and pushed forward.
[...] The Los Angeles Times reports that Spitzer asked that his name be taken off the money wires, which reportedly aroused suspicion. The bank submitted a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the IRS. The payments which totaled up to $80,000, looked suspicious, we are told, and were examined on the basis that they might be an effort to money-launder bribes. This was reported to the IRS in Hauppauge, Long Island, which in turn involved the Public Integrity Section in the Department of Justice.
[...] Spitzer is an extremely wealthy man, and his channeling of payments at the level suggested can hardly be viewed as something that raises legitimate suspicion. As money laundering goes, $40,000 to $80,000 is peanuts--not the sort of thing that would normally raise an eyebrow. Here it is not the sum involved that triggered suspicion; it is the person who made the payments.[...] Several reports about this case have suggested that it is somehow routine for prosecutors to go through the financial records of public officials to look for evidence of corruption. But in the absence of specific grounds justifying the investigation (for instance, an informant complaining about a bribe) prosecutors have no such authority. In this case, the basis for action is extraordinarily weak. Most importantly, the investigators do not appear to be looking into a crime, they appear to be investigating Spitzer in the hopes of finding something compromising.
Scott Horton teaches law at Columbia University and is a legal affairs contributor to Harper's.
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c5005f31-237e-4f9d-bca1-891c7aa2b7b2
So, are you interested enough to continue? Using the wayback machine, let's move to to a previous post from Sander Hicks about Spitzer’s love affair with Larry Silverstein and “relationship” with 9/11:
September 11, 2007, Sander Hicks Hits a Home Run!
9/11 Spitzer Scandal Scoop!
Spitzer's Real Scandal
“Eliot Spitzer is like the good-looking bouncer in a bar, who is secretly dealing drugs,” explained forensic microbiologist Mike Copass. We were in a San Diego bar this July, down near the water in Ocean Beach. Copass had acted as a facilitator of San Diego’s 9/11 Citizen’s Grand Jury, an extra-legal group which mounted a mock trial in April.
Copass has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and an eager glint in his eye. Despite his preppy appearance, Copass makes some pretty radical allegations: that Eliot Spitzer acted as a firewall, preventing public disclosure of his friends’ roles in the anthrax attacks that occurred shortly after 9/11, in addition to facilitating his associates’ windfall from the bloated insurance pay-outs at the World Trade Center. He even accuses Spitzer of covering up the real perpetrators of the 9/11 attack itself.
http://nymegaphone.com/node/24

American Just Us

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman’s been in jail for 247 days without the ability to APPEAL HIS CONVICTION. Although the trial ended 20 months ago, the court hasn’t seen fit to provide his counsel a transcript. Siegelman got 7 years for bribery on a bogus charge created from inuendoes and "indications." And it’s got Karl Rove's greasy fingers all over it. There's a 60s Minutes video included in this post. And if your interest grows, go to www.donsiegelman.com, the “Online Archive for Researchers, the Media & Scholars Interested in the Abuse of Jurisprudence for Political Purposes.” This case was given major attention by Dan Abrams of MSNBC, not just a 10 second sound bite but an investigative report titled: Bush League Justice: Alabama Outrage.
The railroading of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman
Posted February 25th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Back in October, a nationally known print journalist told Harpers’ Scott Horton, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Everything I’ve been told by the convicted defendants checks out as the gospel truth. And everything I’m told by federal prosecutors who pushed the case turns out either to be an outrageous lie or at least a very serious distortion. And the local journalists who wrote the most about the case all behave like they’re accessories after the fact in a criminal investigation.”
The journalist was describing the Don Siegelman case in Alabama, and doing a pretty good job of it.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz in recent weeks about the report “60 Minutes” had been preparing on the controversy and, after having seen it, I’m delighted CBS has made it available for embedding. Please take a few minutes, even if you’ve heard the Siegelman story before, to take a look.
We haven’t struggled for examples of the Bush White House and the Republican Machine making a mockery of our justice system and the rule of law, but this is one of those examples that just leaves one shaking one’s head. No one wants to believe GOP corruption on this scale is even possible, and yet, it’s not only possible, it actually happened. [I want to TESTIFY!]
[...] We haven’t struggled for examples of the Bush White House and the Republican Machine making a mockery of our justice system and the rule of law, but this is one of those examples that just leaves one shaking one’s head. No one wants to believe GOP corruption on this scale is even possible, and yet, it’s not only possible, it actually happened. http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/14685.html
And Jack Abramoff is involved!

Ask Nadler 2 Impeach

Attention New York area Citizens: This meeting is important! Think Nadler is really coming? Did a politician actually listen to their constituency? I'll believe it on March 9th. Even so, I went to the first Town Hall Meeting on this subject, at the Ethical Culture building, and Elizabeth Holtzman is not to be missed. Bruce Fein & Scott Horton ain't no slackers neither.

Town Hall Meeting on Impeachment
Submitted by Jim McCabe on 2008, February 23 - 7:24am.
http://www.pdanewyork.org/node/1970
Please come to the Town Hall Meeting:

"Is Impeachment Necessary to
Protect the Constitution?"
March 9, 2008, 4 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South, NYC.

Speakers

Bruce Fein, Constitutional scholar, former associate deputy attorney general, and Chairman of the American Freedom Agenda
Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and co-author of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens
Scott Horton, Contributor to Harper's Magazine, adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice and the Council on Foreign Relations
Invited Speaker:
Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Member of Congress and Chair of Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Special Guest:
John Nirenberg, a retired college professor from Vermont who walked 485 miles from Boston to Washington, DC to raise the question of impeachment to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
Organized by concerned citizens of AskNadler2Impeach.org, with support from Village Independent Democrats, Democracy for NYC, and Progressive Democrats of New York CD 14.
Admission is Free. For information call 212.340.9548 or email info@asknadler2impeach.org.
Please help spread the word. A pdf version of this notice, suitable for printing, can be downloaded at: http://asknadler2impeach.org/TownHallMeetingFlyer2_21.pdf
Progressive Democrats of New York, Congressional District 14 (PDNYCD14) is a local chapter of Progressive Democrats of America www.pdamerica.org. Broadly stated, our goal is to try to change the Democratic party from the inside by supporting progressive (i.e. liberal) candidates and causes at the local, state and federal level. We also work with other peace and social justice groups to affect progressive change.

Knock 'Em, Sock 'Em, Scott!

Scott Horton was one of the Iraq WMD inspectors who has been speaking truth to power. He now has a radio show on AntiWar.com, and this particular interview is a beaut!

Does America Need Another 9/11? -- An interview with Stu Bykofsky by Scott Horton
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=11463