Lurching along, the Eliot Spitzer call-girl saga is slowly but surely getting pushed into the background by other stories making the rounds lately. (The New York Post did its tawdry best to keep the story in the public eye, putting an almost-topless photo of Spitzer's latest provider on Friday's front page and getting complaints from readers for doing so.) After all, we have the the guilt-by-association attack on Barack Obama for belonging to a church with an outspoken preacher and the forced resignation of Admiral William Fallon for daring to question the White House's drive for war with Iran.
But there might, just might, be more to the Spitzer story than meets the eye. Namely, was he the victim of a political hit job?
To recap: Spitzer's patronage of the Emperor's VIP Club "escort agency" was discovered because he shuffled money around various bank accounts in an attempt to pay for services rendered while avoiding reporting rules. Federal regulations require banks to report all transactions of more than $10,000 to the IRS, and Spitzer apparently structured the transfers so as to come in just under that amount. The pattern still came to the attention of the federal government.
When the US Attorney's office in Manhattan started investigating, they apparently suspected that Spitzer was trying to hide funds gained from political corruption or pay extortion money without setting off alarm bells. The story hit the media only after it was determined that he was in fact paying for high-priced nookie - and it sure sounds like it came from the prosecutor's office. (The original New York Times story on March 10 cited "a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation" as its sources.)
The US Attorney's office is now looking into whether Spitzer's financial activities ran afoul of the Money Laundering Control Act - but the law comes into play only if the money involved is related to unlawful activity (drugs, embezzlement, etc). So they are trying to find any evidence that he used campaign funds or other money not belonging to him personally in order to make him indictable under the MCLA. This part of the story became public in another leak late last week.
If it turns out that Spitzer used his own money, then the only thing federal prosecutors could theoretically get him on is the Mann Act, a century-old law forbidding crossing state lines for "immoral purposes." Nobody disputes using the Mann Act against predators who entice teens to travel cross-country, or human smugglers who forcibly ship women between states to work in brothels. But if there's nothing else there, using it to go after a consenting adult who, however stupidly, paid for encounters with other consenting adults - well, we get onto thin ice here, to put it mildly.
Now the story starts to dovetail with last year's political purge of US Attorneys who were seen as insufficiently "loyal Bushies." When the story originally broke, some wondered what federal prosecutors who weren't axed did to save their jobs. We saw a prosecutor in Alabama put a Democratic governor in jail on what are widely seen as trumped-up charges. We saw a prosecutor in New Jersey loudly launch an investigation of a Democratic senator only a few weeks before the 2006 election - an investigation that went nowhere. And we saw a prosecutor in Wisconsin send a woman to prison on corruption charges in a case immediately dismissed by an appellate court as being completely baseless.
And so on.
With the rampant politicization of the Justice Department, it might not be paranoid to wonder if all this has been part of a politically-motivated prosecution by a "loyal Bushie."
Of course, there is no evidence to support such a claim. Not yet, anyway. But that is the worst part of the White House's manipulation of the federal criminal justice system for purely partisan purposes. When a prominent member of an opposition party is ensnared in a legal web, we can no longer trust that the investigation is free from political taint.
But there might, just might, be more to the Spitzer story than meets the eye. Namely, was he the victim of a political hit job?
To recap: Spitzer's patronage of the Emperor's VIP Club "escort agency" was discovered because he shuffled money around various bank accounts in an attempt to pay for services rendered while avoiding reporting rules. Federal regulations require banks to report all transactions of more than $10,000 to the IRS, and Spitzer apparently structured the transfers so as to come in just under that amount. The pattern still came to the attention of the federal government.
When the US Attorney's office in Manhattan started investigating, they apparently suspected that Spitzer was trying to hide funds gained from political corruption or pay extortion money without setting off alarm bells. The story hit the media only after it was determined that he was in fact paying for high-priced nookie - and it sure sounds like it came from the prosecutor's office. (The original New York Times story on March 10 cited "a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation" as its sources.)
The US Attorney's office is now looking into whether Spitzer's financial activities ran afoul of the Money Laundering Control Act - but the law comes into play only if the money involved is related to unlawful activity (drugs, embezzlement, etc). So they are trying to find any evidence that he used campaign funds or other money not belonging to him personally in order to make him indictable under the MCLA. This part of the story became public in another leak late last week.
If it turns out that Spitzer used his own money, then the only thing federal prosecutors could theoretically get him on is the Mann Act, a century-old law forbidding crossing state lines for "immoral purposes." Nobody disputes using the Mann Act against predators who entice teens to travel cross-country, or human smugglers who forcibly ship women between states to work in brothels. But if there's nothing else there, using it to go after a consenting adult who, however stupidly, paid for encounters with other consenting adults - well, we get onto thin ice here, to put it mildly.
Now the story starts to dovetail with last year's political purge of US Attorneys who were seen as insufficiently "loyal Bushies." When the story originally broke, some wondered what federal prosecutors who weren't axed did to save their jobs. We saw a prosecutor in Alabama put a Democratic governor in jail on what are widely seen as trumped-up charges. We saw a prosecutor in New Jersey loudly launch an investigation of a Democratic senator only a few weeks before the 2006 election - an investigation that went nowhere. And we saw a prosecutor in Wisconsin send a woman to prison on corruption charges in a case immediately dismissed by an appellate court as being completely baseless.
And so on.
With the rampant politicization of the Justice Department, it might not be paranoid to wonder if all this has been part of a politically-motivated prosecution by a "loyal Bushie."
Of course, there is no evidence to support such a claim. Not yet, anyway. But that is the worst part of the White House's manipulation of the federal criminal justice system for purely partisan purposes. When a prominent member of an opposition party is ensnared in a legal web, we can no longer trust that the investigation is free from political taint.
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