Something smells rotten in Denmark in the Spitzer's sex sting case.

Looks and smells like a political prosecution and set up...


Tuesday's Times added: "The rendezvous that established Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with high-priced prostitutes occurred last month in one of Washington’s grandest hotels, but the criminal investigation that discovered the tryst began last year in a nondescript office building opposite a Dunkin’ Donuts on Long Island... There, in the Hauppauge offices of the Internal Revenue Service, 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."

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

Horton doesn't buy it.

"Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice," Horton writes on his blog, "No Comment." "This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican."

In his post at Harper's, Horton notes:

(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.

"The answer of the Justice Department to all this is likely to be: Trust us," Horton concludes. "This has nothing to do with Spitzer’s guilt or innocence. But it has everything to do with the fading integrity of the Public Integrity Section."

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002589

Let's not forget the blast from the past from last year:


Police surveillance by the Governor's Office

On July 23, 2007, Cuomo's office admonished the Spitzer administration for ordering the State Police to keep special records of Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno's whereabouts when he traveled with police escorts in New York City. At the direction of top officials of the Spitzer administration, the New York State Police created documents meant to cause political damage to Bruno. The governor's staff had stated they were responding to a Freedom of Information request from the Albany Times-Union in late June. A scathing 57-page report issued by the Attorney General's office concluded that Spitzer aides did not simply produce records, as the state Freedom of Information Law requires, but were instead engaged in planning and producing media coverage concerning Senator Bruno's travel on state aircraft before any FOIL request was made. The investigation looked into both Bruno's travel and the senate leader's allegation that Spitzer used State Police to spy on him. It also suggests that the governor's staff lied when they tried to explain what they had done and forced the State Police to go far beyond their normal procedures in documenting Mr. Bruno's whereabouts.

We have a President that lies to the American people and drags us into a war on false pretenses at a cost that could bankrupt ths country . And we have a former prosecutor and current Governor of New York that illicit sex fron prostitutes. So which lie is important?