Spitzer Investigation Time Line

TPM Muckracker has the skinny.

AF

Set Up? Not!

Raw Story mauls yet another important story with an unfortunate and inaccurate headline: Lawyer questions whether Spitzer was set up, noting political prosecutions. Scott Horton's story says nothing about a "set up." Set up is defined as "something done by deceit or trickery in order to compromise or frame someone." Elliot Spitzer wasn't framed. He committed a crime. He may be a huge hypocrite and disappointment but he wasn't "set up.".

By falsely crying "Set Up!", Raw aids the right wing noise machine's attempts to obscure the extremely disconcerting Ken Starr-like aspect of this story: the US government was apparently investigating Spitzer, the once rising star of the Democratic party, not because they had any evidence that he had ever committed any crime but to see if they could find any evidence that he had ever committed a crime.

This is not a minor distinction. As Scott Horton puts it more clearly:

All of these facts are consistent with a process which is not the investigation of a crime, but rather an attempt to target and build a case against an individual.

The contrast between a swift politically motivated investigation of Spitzer to determine if there was evidence (plus the accompanying leak) and the many stalled and undisclosed or reluctantly disclosed investigation of Republicans couldn't be more distinct.

I guarantee that if you devote enough resources to investigate anyone, you will find them guilty of some crime large or small. (This is doubly so when combing through someone's financials). Ken Starr spent $40 million+ and seven years to find Bill Clinton guilty not for murdering Vince Foster, the alleged Whitewater swindle, Travelgate et al but lying about his infidelity. I'm not absolving Bill Clinton or Spitzer of their guilt. Even smart people do very stupid things. Eliot Spitzer was very, very stupid.

It will be interesting to see how the Bush Administration attempts to justify this one.

AF

Harper's Horton & Silverstein on Spitzer Investigation

Harper's Scott Horton has this thought provoking take on the Spitzer investigation. Here's the nub of The Spitzer Sex Sting: A Few More Questions:

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. Here are a few:

• Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first man prosecuted under the act — for having an affair with Lucille Cameron, whom he later married. The prosecution was manifestly an effort “to get” Johnson, who at the time was the most famous African-American. (All of this is developed well in Ken Burns’s film “Unforgiveable Blackness”).

• University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas was prosecuted for having an affair with an officer’s wife in France. Thomas was targeted because of his Bohemian social and his radical political views.

• In 1944 Charles Chaplin was prosecuted for having an affair with actress Joan Barry. The prosecution again provided cover for a politically motivated effort to drive Chaplin out of the country.

• Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was arrested and charged in 1940 while crossing the border with the British poet George Barker.

(3) The resources dedicated to the case in terms of prosecutors and investigators are extraordinary.

(4) How the investigation got started. The Justice Department has yet to give a full account of why they were looking into Spitzer’s payments, and indeed the suggestion in the ABC account is that it didn’t have anything to do with a prostitution ring. The suggestion that this was driven by an IRS inquiry and involved a bank might heighten, rather than allay, concerns of a politically motivated prosecution.

Horton's colleague Ken Silverstein catches this powerful point from a reader:

Amazing how Senator David Vitter’s name never leaked out of the Justice Department after the arrest of the D.C. Madam, but Eliot Spitzer’s name leaked out of the Justice Department within a week of the initial arrest in the Emperor V.I.P. case.

Yes, amazing isn't it?

AF

The Bubble & The Damage Done

The consistently genius Scott Horton at Harper's No Comment blog has these excellent twin posts examining our "faith-based" economy: "The Bubble Bursts" and "How Bush's Fiscal Mismanagement Produced a Recession." He also offer a similarly excellent evisceration of Orwell admirer Michael Mukasey "Bulletins from the Ministry for Torture." Sadly, Mukasey admires Orwell for not for the substance of his cautionary prose but for the clarity of his vision. Further proof that some among us were born without the irony gland.

Mr. Horton, a lawyer, has also written extensively about the Bush Administration's enlistment of the US Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. This time his focus is not on the USA's or Alabama. In order to prove just how widespread this practice was, Horton takes us to the Motor City in A Political Prosecution Goes Under the Microscope.

AF

**Note: This post edited slightly for clarity.

Outrage Overload

So much outrage, so little time. I have a couple of posts in progress.

While you're waiting, Scott Horton has three typically genius posts at Harper's No Comment blog: Voltaire on the Danger of Being Right When Those in Authority Are Wrong, Vladimir Putin: Person of the Year and continued insight into the GOP 's persecutive prosecution of Alabama's former Democratic Governor: Siegelman Accuser Released

AF