Timing is everything (maybe)

Fans of all things Spitzer, fasten your seatbelts. . . .

Three days after the Miami Herald posted a story about a letter sent to the FBI by Republican hit man Roger Stone regarding now former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s encounters with “high-priced call-girls” in Florida, the New York Times front pages a piece on Spitzer’s deeper-than-heretofore-revealed involvement with the something-less-than-scintillating scandal known to New Yorkers as “Troopergate.”

This all comes, of course, less than a fortnight after the “revelations” that linked Spitzer to a prostitution ring and forced him to resign the governorship.

I put “revelations” in quotes because, after all, what we are really talking about are leaks.

While the affidavit that triggered the arrests of four people involved with the operation of the prostitution ring did not provide the actual names of the johns, someone inside the investigation told the New York Times that the affidavit’s “Client 9” was Eliot Spitzer. That information came from a still anonymous source, and while Spitzer has not denied any of the allegations, no one affiliated with the government has confirmed the Spitzer-Client 9 link on the record.

The former governor has yet to be charged with any crime related to this incident, and likely won’t, since it now seems that the US Attorney’s office was simply using the information on Spitzer as leverage to force him to step down.

Further, the “revelation” that Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI last November comes from Stone’s attorney. No one at the FBI will confirm that they ever received this letter, and the specific party to whom this letter was supposedly sent is blacked out on the copy provided by Stone’s attorney to the Herald.

Stone—who has an “ick” dial that goes to eleven—claims that he met a prostitute at a Miami sex club who complained to him that she missed a chance to service Spitzer and had to pass him on to a friend. . . who then provided this prostitute with silly details (he keeps his socks on!) that she recounted to Stone. . . who in turn sent them on to the FBI. . . so that they could “confirm” the allegations.

Roger Stone, need I remind you, is the guy that had to resign his position as a consultant to the New York State Republican party last summer after he was accused of leaving a threatening, expletive-strewn message on the phone machine of Eliot Spitzer’s father. Stone denies this, but an investigation showed that the call came from Stone’s home, and most who’ve heard the message agree that it’s Stone’s voice.

Stone explained this by claiming that someone must have broken into his apartment and mimicked his voice while he was at a Broadway play. . . and if you aren’t laughing hard enough about that, I should add that it turns out that said play was dark on the night in question.

Now push that aside for a minute while we consider the “revelation” that Eliot Spitzer played a larger hand in “Troopergate,” which involves the use of New York State police to investigate whether State Senate Majority Leader, Republican Joe Bruno, illegally used state transportation for personal trips, and the leak of the information on Bruno’s misuse to the Albany Times Union by Spitzer aid Darren Dopp. Today’s story in the New York Times, which includes juicy—and I mean that literally—details about Spitzer’s level of anger (coffee shot from his mouth), is based completely on anonymous sources inside the office of Albany County District Attorney David Soares.

Yes, somebody leaked that Spitzer spits.

Confused? Yeah, well, I have some questions, too: Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, and why?

Why did the Feds target Eliot Spitzer, pursue the investigation through a warrant for a wiretap, and then take down that wiretap immediately after Client 9 was caught hiring a prostitute.

Why did someone in the US Attorney’s office leak Spitzer’s name to the Times?

Why did the leaker(s) decide to cash in this big chip now?

Why was Spitzer’s resignation part of the negotiations on whether he would be charged with a crime?

Why is Roger Stone suddenly going public with this letter that he allegedly sent to the FBI—especially when we already know that the investigation into the prostitution ring started at least a month before the date on this letter?

Why should we believe Stone’s story about how he got this information, or as to why he felt the need to tell the FBI a second hand story about something that is actually not illegal?

Why is someone inside the Troopergate probe leaking information from an ongoing investigation to the New York Times?

And, why was this source doing so less than two weeks after Spitzer’s resignation and/or three days after the Stone letter was published?

I have gone into some detail about the questionable motives of the federal agencies that went about digging up the dirt on Eliot Spitzer. As I have said, while I believe that Spitzer is guilty of stupidity, hubris, and hypocrisy (and had squandered his political capital while making few friends in State government), I feel fairly certain that he was targeted for takedown by a politicized justice system. But what to make of this weekend’s “revelations?”

Roger Stone (who—and I just can’t help but add this detail—has Richard Nixon’s head tattooed on his back) might have just spammed the Feds with dirt on Spitzer in order to ingratiate himself with GOP officials, or, he might have just faked a letter and released it for similar self-serving purposes. But one of the first things that occurred to me while I was reading the Miami Herald, and, later, New York Times stories, was that Stone’s tale of how he came by the information about Spitzer was a cover. I think it just as plausible that someone inside some part of the Spitzer investigation leaked the story to Stone knowing he’d have to tell someone—providing the Feds with a self-confirming feedback loop should other parts of the investigation come up short (remember that while the investigation of the prostitution link starts in October 2007, we only know of Spitzer being caught on tape in February 2008). (Lindsay Beyerstein also thinks Stone’s story is a bit hinky.)

As for the timing of Stone’s release, it is possible that it is just more self-aggrandizement, or maybe it reflects Stone’s annoyance that one of his bitter enemies, Spitzer, isn’t likely to be charged with any crime.

The timing of the Soares leak is more curious. This investigation is still weeks away from its completion. The news does partially exonerate Darren Dopp—who had previously taken full responsibility for the leak of the original Bruno information to the Albany Times Union—but the New York Times says that the leak comes from inside the investigation, and not from Dopp.

What good does this leak do now? Is there some advantage to be gained somewhere by pushing the Stone story off the top line? Does this leak reflect well or poorly on Soares (who had previously closed his investigation, only to reopen it when Dopp was granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation)?

And where does State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo figure into all of this? Cuomo also had his eye on the governorship in 2006, and is considered by most state observers to have been on less than good terms with Spitzer. It was Cuomo’s initial probe into Troopergate that was supposed to put the issue to bed, but the casual method by which Cuomo conducted the investigation is part of the reason that Soares was compelled to open his inquiry.

I don’t have an answer for this last part, but the timing of the leak does bother me—as does the source.

And, while I’m on the subject of timing, I would be remiss if I did not mention a story brought to my attention by Alex Thurston. Alex sent me a link to this video, which points to an opinion piece penned by Eliot Spitzer and published in the Washington Post on February 14th of this year.

In the editorial, Spitzer accuses the Bush Administration of colluding with banks in the propagation of predatory sub-prime loans. As Spitzer concludes:

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

The most visible part of the collapse of the sub-prime sector and the investigation of Spitzer’s personal banking and sexual predilections, of course, basically run parallel. . . which is interesting. The authorization of the wiretap that linked New York’s former governor to a prostitution ring—the one that confirmed Client 9’s encounter with a call-girl in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel the night before the publication of Spitzer’s op-ed—well, that timing might be just as interesting.


(cross-posted on The Seminal)

Reporters reveal source in the Spitzer story: MySpace

With the official resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer now out of the way, it appears that the establishment media can get back to reporting on what by all accounts clearly matters most in this scandal: the sex.

Though most national and New York media outlets did lead with the actual resignation speech, delivered in Manhattan around midday, Wednesday, the fact that the embattled governor was now to be the less embattled ex-governor made Spitzer’s troubles, and how we all were made aware of them, essentially, old news.

So, what’s new—or more to the point, what’s news? Why it’s the identity of the 22-year-old woman known as “Kristen” in the affidavit that details her liaison with Client 9 (Spitzer) at a DC hotel just last month. The local NBC affiliate newscast gave her identity substantially more time than Spitzer’s speech. ABC’s “investigative reporter” Brian Ross gobbled up the first segment of Nightline with breathless accounts of the woman’s “history” and “career.” The Los Angeles Times and New York Times each feature the story prominently on the front page of their online editions. The NY Times even runs a picture—right under one of Spitzer and his wife.

It was apparently the New York Times—the first paper to reveal the governor’s involvement with the prostitution ring—that “broke” the story of “Kristen’s” real identity, and I suppose they deserve some sort of credit because they actually went to the trouble of calling this woman and conducting at least a cursory interview. But the NY Times, and the three other outlets that I mention, mostly base their reports on that up-to-the-minute, of the moment, always factual, and thoroughly unimpeachable source known as MySpace.

Yes, you read that right.

Thanks to her MySpace page, we all now “know” that “Kristen” left a “broken home” at 17, has been “homeless,” has done “drugs,” but is now “all about [her] music.” It is possible that this is true (and the NYT did speak with the woman, her lawyer, and her mother), but there is absolutely nothing in any of the reports that would lead one to believe that a page on MySpace doesn’t actually have to be completely factual. (“The page is candid, reciting the disturbing details of a hard life,” reports the LA Times, who did not speak with “Kristen,” herself.)

The television reports are the worst—simply reciting the text from the webpage, with only oblique references to its provenance, or equally oblique camera angles of highlighted text on a computer screen—but even the papers rely overwhelmingly on MySpace without a hint of irony or suspicion. Eleven of the 23 paragraphs in the NYT article mention, quote, or attribute information to the MySpace page.

And then there are remarkable revelations such as this (from the NY Times):

Music is her first love, and on the MySpace page, Ms. [Kristen] mentions Patsy Cline, Frank Sinatra, Christina Aguilera and Lauryn Hill among a long list of influences, including her brother, Kyle. (She also lists Whitney Houston, Madonna, Mary J. Blige and Amy Winehouse as her top MySpace friends.)

Well, she did fuck a governor, so I suppose it is possible that Madonna and Mary J. Blige are her friends. I’ll admit, to again give them credit, that the NYT did at least call them “MySpace friends.” WNBC, by contrast, went to the trouble of finding a less famous area man also listed as one of “Kristen’s” MySpace friends to ask him what he thought of all the recent news.

To no one’s surprise—except maybe the team at WNBC—the guy didn’t know “Kristen” and had never met her.

The LA Times had a similarly hot lead:

Nick Hanson of South Huntington was surprised to find out that someone on his MySpace friends list was involved in the Spitzer saga.

"I really never met her or talked to her," he said. "I just added her as a friend," after she sent him an invitation. "It seemed like she was very interested in music."

I hope you are laughing half as hard as I did.

Oh, and, “Kristen’s” music? Well, I will let some other netizen write that post.

The TV and newspaper reports all ran numerous pictures of “Kristen,” also taken directly from her MySpace page. Only the New York Times takes the time to explain the path from “Kristen’s” birth name, to her legal name, to the name on her MySpace page (all three are different—and none of them contain “Kristen”); WNBC gave her birth name, the other two just used the MySpace name as if it were her legal name.

I’m not sure that any of this naming names is a good thing, by the way. I have scrupulously avoided using any names other than her “hooker name” (though I understand that I link to the articles) because I don’t think she is really the story here (she might be a story, but well, not one that is going to keep me coming back for more). And, even though she seems a willing participant in her “outing,” I’m not entirely sure that this is the kind of PR she wanted (nor do I really feel like being part of it, even if she did).

But, to return to the heavy use of MySpace—I hope I am not the only one who is troubled by this. First, simply, because I fail to see how merely regurgitating large parts of someone’s self-generated profile from a social website is really news (I already am sure it isn’t “reporting”); second, and perhaps even more troubling, is that none of the stories give me much confidence that the reporters actually understand what MySpace is, or why it isn’t really a fantastic frame on which to hang the bulk of a news piece.

What it is, of course, is easy. I will resist the obvious joke, here, but some slightly different metaphors regarding pimps, prostitutes, and junkies might be of use.

I will, however, leave that to your imagination, because I actually want to finish on a high note—for journalism, that is—or a low note, if you think about the world we now live in.

As I mentioned in an update at the bottom of yesterday’s post, journalists (and I mean that sincerely) Jim Sleeper (of Talking Points Memo) and Wayne Barrett (of the Village Voice) discussed the Eliot Mess on WNYC with host Brian Lehrer, Albany specialist Andrea Bernstein, and NPR’s Adam Davidson. It was one of the more sober and serious discussions of the scandal itself, and, more important to me, the politics of the investigation, and the leak that revealed it.

Jim Sleeper posted something similar to his on-air comments later on TPM Café:

Eliot Spitzer’s resignation is a tragedy in the strictest classical sense: The legal substance of his offenses pales before his stupidity, hypocrisy, and, yes, immorality in committing them. . . .

But while Spitzer brought this on himself, that doesn’t let his Republican inquisitors entirely off the hook.

Their professional narrative is that the case simply fell into their laps and that they handled it with all due restraint: A routine bank review turned up “suspicious activity;” a routine follow-up by the IRS and then the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network showed that a public official was involved, thereby bumping the matter to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney, who obtained a wiretap of conversations which, of course, they had to listen to and parse. All they did after that was inform Spitzer, as the law also requires them to do.

And then they stepped back and watched him implode.

Not quite. Prosecutors were indeed required to tell Spitzer about the wiretap, but in no way were they required or indeed permitted to tell anyone else. Spitzer outed himself only after one or more of the dozen assistant U.S. Attorneys and scores of IRS, FBI, and other agents and managers in Washington and New York involved in this case committed the crime of leaking it to the New York Times.

Again, I am far from suggesting that that excuses him. I am asking a question or two about what else was going on, parallel to his own self-destruction.

Was the Justice Department as innocent and surprised by its findings as the official narrative insists? Will we now have the Justice Department moving heaven and earth to turn up its leakers? The legacy of George Bush’s disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and of too many Republican U.S. Attorneys casts a long shadow here.

Wayne Barrett perhaps went a step further. There is no written transcript of the show, but Barrett makes no bones about saying that the investigation “raises all kinds of questions,” and “smacks of a case that had a single target.”

Barrett notes that the Feds just renewed their warrant for the wiretap on February 21st, and brought down that wire only two weeks later. “Why would you rush the investigation?” asks Barrett, who says that he has never seen anything quite like this. “Very strange. . . . Contrary to ordinary practice.”

Barrett believes that the Republican prosecutor got the guy the Feds wanted, and took down the wire before they rolled up anymore “fat cats.” Citing the statistic that the Bush DoJ has gone after Democrats six times more often than Republicans, Barrett doubts that prosecutors would have “done the same thing” if they had caught a Republican.

Like Sleeper, I know that this doesn’t explain or excuse Spitzer’s hypocrisy, but like Sleeper and Barrett, I am pretty sure there is more to this story than the official, un-partisan narrative.

To come to this conclusion (or, if not quite a conclusion, an awareness), all I did was ask a few simple questions and apply a sense of historical context. Sleeper and Barrett clearly did the same. I have not surveyed the pages of every one of “Kristen’s” friends, but I am guessing that they don’t include that much context or history about the US Attorney scandal, warrantless surveillance, or the partisan machinations of the Bush Administration. I have digested the stories from four news outlets built on the MySpace “source,” and it seems that asking questions about, well, about much of anything, really, is more than we can ask of those “investigative journalists.”

Thank god we at least have the sex to keep us interested.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Spitzer probe: full of sound and fury; signifying nothing

Updated 2x

Below all the stories about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s imminent demise, the calls for his resignation, the indignation about his behavior, and the general air of schadenfreude about a guy whose overreach exceeded his ham-fisted grasp, there is an article in today’s New York Times that basically says this: When it comes to pursuing a prosecution of Spitzer, the Feds have nothin’.

To update some of yesterday’s details: it is now reported that the probe into Spitzer’s financial transactions began in July, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, though the Times cannot confirm whether AG AG had any knowledge of the Spitzer case.

Maybe that was because Gonzales was too busy fending off accusations that he had politicized the Justice Department in order to pursue partisan investigations and prosecutions.

Just sayin’. . . .

The investigation was triggered, as I mentioned yesterday, by a series of sub-$10,000 transactions between Spitzer’s accounts and a then-unknown shell corporation, QAT. Most reports say that the Suspicious Activity Reports were filed by the banks with the Treasury Department and then referred to the IRS because it looked like Spitzer was trying to hide something. And because Spitzer was a public official, the belief was that it must have involved organized crime or graft of some sort.

What reports are fuzzy about—to say the least—is at what point it was realized that the money was being used to pay for prostitutes, and why, at that point, the case wasn’t transferred from the Public Integrity Section to the criminal division, or, as would have been more typical in a different age, referred to state or local law enforcement.

There are two possible answers to that question (well, at least two answers that you can offer without admitting criminal behavior, yourself): 1) the pattern of money transfers engaged a federal statute that prohibited “structuring”—an attempt to hide larger cash payments by making smaller ones—and, 2) Spitzer’s contracting to have a prostitute from New York meet him in DC violated the Mann Act. But, as is already glaringly obvious, neither of those two possibilities stands up to simple scrutiny.

A charge of structuring, as today’s Times story tells us, requires prosecutors prove intent—and that intent has to be of a sufficiently nefarious nature:

Dale P. Kelberman, a former federal prosecutor in Baltimore who has had experience with the financial reporting statutes, said the motivation in moving money around would be critical in any decision about whether the law was broken. If the governor was simply trying to conceal his activities from, say, his wife, it would be considered different from trying to deceive federal authorities.

“There are innocent reasons for structuring transactions that need to be considered,” Mr. Kelberman said.

The chance that Spitzer will be charged under the Mann Act is also small. First, again, as noted yesterday, the matter that caused a woman to cross state lines for “immoral sex” did not occur until February of this year—long after the investigation had realized exactly what was going on with the financial transactions, and months after the US Attorney, Michael Garcia, had already sought permission (likely from AG Michael Mukasey, even though his office denies his involvement) to indict a “public official.”

That raises the question of what charges exactly that indictment would be on, but assuming it was supposed to be a retrofit of the Mann Act, well, here’s what former federal prosecutor Charles Stillman thinks:

While in theory Mr. Spitzer could face charges of violating the Mann Act, a 1910 law, Mr. Stillman said it had almost never been used in modern times against customers, only those involved in managing a prostitution operation.

“The idea of prosecuting for it is just over the top,” he said. “I just don’t see that as a reality here.”

So what is left? There was talk yesterday afternoon of charging Spitzer with “money laundering”—but, whether that was a separate but unexplained charge or another way of reporting on structuring, that term is nowhere to be found in the Wednesday Times reports.

Which brings us back to things like the seven deadly sins—lust and hubris come to mind—and the hard-to-refute charge of rank hypocrisy. And it can also be said that Spitzer was an idiot for not realizing that the banking laws and the Bush-era surveillance state would leave his “sins” readily available for public exposure. All possibly deep flaws that might make Eliot Spitzer a less than ideal leader, but not, in themselves, crimes.

New York State politicians and pundits will no doubt spend today strutting and fretting about the “Eliot Mess,” and, by the end of the day, Governor Spitzer might find his brief but brightly burning political career snuffed out. But he will likely not find himself facing time in a dusty jail cell.


Update: WNYC is now reporting that two sources close to the Governor confirm that Eliot Spitzer will be resigning today. (It is now reported that Spitzer will announce at 11:30am EDT that he will resign effective Monday to give David Patterson time to arrange the transition.)

Update 2: Jim Sleeper and Wayne Barrett are both talking on WNYC (they might post a link to the audio later this afternoon) and both think that while Spitzer was “hoist with his own petard” (goody, more Shakespeare!), both also think that with regard to this investigation something is rotten in the State of Denmark (couldn’t resist). Much of the discussion is similar to what I have detailed over the last two days, but Barrett especially thinks that the way the wiretap was handled—it was put up and taken down very quickly—shows this to be a political “assassination” (yes, he used that word).



(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Asking the question

From the nanosecond after the New York Times posted its story about Governor Eliot Spitzer’s use of high-priced prostitutes (the story has been repeatedly updated, and, to be honest, only details one interaction, though the implication seems to be that Spitzer was a regular client), tongues were wagging, keyboards were clacking, and thumbs were making whatever noise they do while texting. Everybody had the same outraged, indignant question: What in god’s name was Spitzer thinking?

Well, almost everybody. Well, at least, kind of. . . I’ll explain in a moment.

Here’s what we seem to know: On at least one occasion, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer paid to have sex with a woman who was not his wife. This woman worked for a rather expensive multinational booking service that saw four of its principle operators arrested at the end of last week. Spitzer is not named in the affidavit, but it is generally agreed that he is “Client 9”; there are nine other unnamed clients in the affidavit. The woman that met Spitzer was contracted in New York to travel to Washington DC, where she met Spitzer in a hotel room that Spitzer procured for the encounter under the name George Fox. (George Fox, it turns out, is a real person and a friend of Spitzer’s, but Fox says he had no knowledge of this transaction.)

As of this writing, Spitzer has made a public statement of apology, though he did not specify for what. Rumors are that there is a debate among his family and close advisors over whether he has to resign. If Spitzer resigns, NY Lieutenant Governor David Patterson, a Democrat, assumes the office of Governor for the remainder of the term. New York Senate Majority Leader and Spitzer nemesis Joe Bruno, a Republican, would assume the duties of Lieutenant Governor.

Here’s what else we seem to know: This case was not begun as an investigation of a prostitution ring that then just happened to turn up the name Eliot Spitzer. This scandal (I think we can call it that—it already has a name: The Eliot Mess) began as an investigation of Spitzer:

[IRS] investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said. …

The money ended up in the bank accounts of what appeared to be shell companies, corporations that essentially had no real business.

The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators. …

Because the focus was a high-ranking government official, prosecutors were required to seek the approval of the United States attorney general to proceed. Once they secured that permission, the investigation moved forward.

At the outset, one official said, it seemed like a bread-and-butter inquiry into political corruption, the kind of case the F.B.I. squad, known internally by the designation C14, frequently pursues.

But before long, the investigators learned that the money was being moved to pay for sex and that the transactions were being manipulated to conceal Mr. Spitzer’s connection to payments for meetings with prostitutes, the official said.

What was that suspicious financial transaction exactly? It reportedly was something called “structuring,” which, I am told, is the movement of small amounts of money (under $10,000) that appear designed to obscure the movement of larger amounts (e.g. instead of just moving, say, $10,050, you move $4,000, $2,500, and then $3,550 in some short period of time). This structuring triggered an investigation that showed money moving into a shell company. . . which triggered an investigation of Spitzer for what was believed to be graft of some sort. . . that investigation pulled back the curtain on a “prostitution ring” known as the Emperor’s Club. . . .

That revelation led to a warrant for a wiretap—several wiretaps, actually—on those running the Emperor’s Club. Stories imply that this is a federal warrant.

Those wiretaps are apparently what provide us with the transcripts that include Spitzer’s arrangement to move a woman across state lines for “immoral sex” (that’s the Mann Act talking, not me) on February 13th of this year.

Which brings us to our first problem. Prostitution is usually not prosecuted as a federal crime. It becomes a federal crime when Spitzer contracts to have a New York sex worker meet him in DC. But that didn’t happen until after the warrants were issued—and the Feds presumably only know of this interstate commerce because it was picked up on a tap under those warrants.

The affidavit telling of the alleged crimes of the four prostitution ring leaders include many quotes from the calls surrounding that February tryst. One charge goes to great length to explain that Client 9 wanted to do something “unsafe” with the woman, but that woman had ways of telling her clients that if they wanted to have sex, unsafe wasn’t an option.

Problem number two: having unsafe sex, to the best of my knowledge, is not a crime—state or federal—at least not any more of a crime than having protected sex with a prostitute. (There are a few cases where persons who had AIDS and knowingly set out to infect others have been prosecuted, but that is in no way part of this story.) So, why are these details part of the indictment?

Let’s backtrack just a bit.

This investigation is managed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Public Integrity (I’ve also seen it called the Public Integrity Section of the DoJ). The OPI/PIS, as is noted by Harper’s Scott Horton, has been intimately involved with a scandal of its own concerning “politically directed prosecutions.”

During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican. Beyond this, a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles. Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats. So here are the rather amazing facts that surface in the Spitzer case:

(1) The prosecutors handling the case came from the Public Integrity Section.

(2) The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive.

Yes, there’s that darn Mann Act again. (Horton and Digby both detail its long, antiquated, and sordid history.) The problem is, as mentioned, according to the affidavit (at least in Spitzer’s case), that the violation of the White-Slave Traffic Act doesn’t occur until months after the investigation was opened.

In fact, in a different New York Times story related to the Eliot Mess, we read that the call that links Spitzer to a violation of the Mann Act was swept up in a massive trawl:

The conversations, according to the affidavit, were among more than 5,000 telephone calls and text messages that the federal authorities intercepted during the course of the investigation into the prostitution ring, which began last October. Investigators also seized more than 6,000 e-mail messages, bank records, and travel and hotel records, and conducted physical surveillance.

This level of investigation would have to be approved all the way up the chain of command, through the appropriate United States Attorney, to the United States Attorney General.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York is Michael Garcia (more on him shortly), but over the course of the last year, we’ve actually had three US AGs—the October start date places approval in the lap of acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, who served between the resignation of Alberto Gonzales and the swearing in of Michael Mukasey. Keisler, a cofounder of the Federalist Society, former clerk for Robert Bork and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, has been thrice nominated by George Bush to fill a spot on the DC Circuit.

Michael Garcia was an assistant to then US Attorney Mary Jo White during the prosecution of the 1993 Trade Center bombers. In 2003, Garcia, a registered Republican, was tapped to head the INS as it was brought inside the Department of Homeland Security and renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2005, Garcia—whom has been called a “Chertoff crony”—was named as the USA for the Southern District.

Garcia was apparently ready to roll with an indictment of “a public figure” a couple of months ago, but first needed authority granted to him by the Attorney General (now Mike Mukasey). Garcia kept investigating until he was granted that authority—which appears to be normal procedure—but the only references to Client 9 in the Emperor's Club affidavit are all from less than a month ago. I do not have an explanation for this apparent discrepancy.

Oh, but there’s more. . .

I am confused by this revelation in the ancillary NYT story:

Then, with the assistance of a confidential informant, a young woman who had worked previously as a prostitute for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., the escort service that Mr. Spitzer was believed to be using, the investigators were able to get a judge to approve wiretaps on the cellphones of some of those suspected of involvement in the escort service.

The informant had previously worked for the escort service, but the investigation didn’t turn up the prostitution angle until after Spitzer was being investigated for structuring. . . which seems to indicate that the informant had left the Emperor’s Club before the period that concerns the part of the investigation that involves the governor. It could be that parts of the timeline have yet to be reported, but as I read it, there seems to be something circular about the logic that permits investigators to tie Spitzer to a specific sexual contract.

And, (almost) finally, with all of the talk of Spitzer’s political downfall, and the governor’s fights with Joe Bruno, I thought about the rather substantial—like half-a-million dollars substantial—donation made by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the state GOP. . . just last week. . . after Bloomberg put an end to rumors about a bid for US president. . . after the state Republicans lost a special election that shaved their Senate majority to one. . . after Bloomberg let slip the idea that he might be something other than president, like, you know, governor. (Jane Hamsher had similar thoughts, among several others.) With the relationship between Bloomberg and Mukasey known to be close, is it at all possible that Mayor Mike heard anything from US AG Mike about a soon to be weakened NY governor?

At this point I should hasten to add that Eliot Spitzer has yet to be charged with anything. None of the clients listed in the affidavit have been charged (and only Spitzer has been linked to a number). Further, if Spitzer is charged with a crime, the reports seem to indicate that it will be for the structuring—trying to conceal financial transactions—rather than anything to do with the actual sex.

Since Spitzer has prosecuted so-called “prostitution rings” in the past, and has made public pronouncements about the morality of such crimes, he is likely guilty of rank hypocrisy, what else he is guilty of remains an open question.

Which brings me back to the beginning: What in god’s name was Spitzer thinking?

When most of the myriad talkers and typers were asking that, they were no doubt thinking: What was Spitzer doing frequenting prostitutes? Is he nuts? He has a wife! He wants to be President! Prostitutes?!?

I suppose that’s a valid question, but, to me, it is not a particularly interesting one.

Here's the thing—I am not really that amazed that an aggressive and powerful politico thought that he could get away with paying for sex. Spitzer is hardly the first, and he will certainly not be the last. The morality of this behavior can be debated, but the originality of it cannot.

But here’s what I am amazed by: I am amazed that a Democrat—no, let’s make that any Democrat—thinks that he or she can do anything on the sly and keep it secret these days.

I actually have to wonder, as I've wondered before, if elected Democrats realize that issues like the US Attorney scandal and warrantless surveillance are not just inside baseball, not just about a debatable difference of opinion on the balance to strike between security and civil rights, but are rather about Republican attempts to lock in one party rule.

Does Spitzer or any of the Democratic Party leadership really believe that their calls and e-mails are not being monitored? Ten years ago, maybe I would have broken out the tinfoil hats, but now, after all we know? C'mon!

What in god’s name was Spitzer thinking?


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)