In the deluge of commentary on the Spitzer scandal, I thought this piece by Alan Dershowitz in the Wall Street Journal was the best. As he says, what we know of the investigation so far is very odd—not as odd as Spitzer’s behavior, I grant you, but strange nonetheless.
There is no hard evidence that Eliot Spitzer was targeted for investigation, but the story of how he was caught does not ring entirely true to many experienced former prosecutors and current criminal lawyers. The New York Times reported that the revelations began with a routine tax inquiry by revenue agents "conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks." This investigation allegedly found "several unusual movements of cash involving the Governor of New York." But the movement of the amounts of cash required to pay prostitutes, even high-priced prostitutes over a long period of time, does not commonly generate a full-scale investigation...In this case, if the serendipitous bank audit really led federal agents to Mr. Spitzer, and Mr. Spitzer led them to the Emperor's Club, and federal prosecutors really wanted to get the Club, they could easily have sent an undercover cop to pose as a john, instead of tapping phones and reading emails -- tactics designed to catch and embarrass Mr. Spitzer with his own recorded words, which could be, and were, leaked to the media. As this newspaper has reported: "It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . ."
What exactly were the Feds investigating in the first place, and why? Summing up, Dershowitz quotes Beria, I think aptly:
Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin's KGB, once quipped to his boss, "show me the man and I will find the crime." The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad.Both Democrats and Republicans have targeted political adversaries over the years. The weapons of choice are almost always elastic criminal laws. And few laws are more elastic, and susceptible to abuse, than federal laws on money laundering and sex crimes. For the sake of all Americans, these laws should be narrowed and limited to predatory crimes with real victims.
This is one reason I find the chorus of exultation over Spitzer’s downfall hard to take. Another is that it is wrong in any case, in my view, to criminalize prostitution—a victimless crime if ever there was one. But having said all this it is difficult to summon much sympathy for the man. You could never accuse Spitzer of having exercised restraint in his use of broadly framed laws, not to mention the awesome and largely unchecked powers of his office, to coerce his targets into submission without the nuisance of a trial. He was on the right side of a lot of the investor-protection issues he chose to champion as a prosecutor, I think, but still by word and deed he always struck me as a tyrant. It is dangerous to trust that kind of man with that kind of power. It is still a great shame that it took this to stop him in his tracks.
03/14/08 Friday
Pride goeth before a Fall!
How sad that the denouement-to this tragedy
played-out so swiftly-- and it merely took
one, very-well-paid, call girl to do so. It is
disappointing that the media is enabling HER
fortunes-to rise, at the downfall to a
public-servant-guy. With the fall of Mr. Spritzer,
whom, in-fact will go after BIG BUSINESS?
The guy deserves everything he gets... I say this because he was using the medium of games as a political step up during the GTA "Hot Coffee" Scandel and was trying to take some moral high ground denouncing games because of violence and prostitution. Well well well Mr Spritzer what is that your doing here? Hypocrite!
http://www.g4tv.com/thepile/videos/20712/Sesslers_Soapbox_Ode_to_a_Hypocrite.html
03/14/08 Friday
>It makes sense that Mr. Dershowitz defended
a former colleague at Harvard, Mr. Spitzer.
What does not make sense to me: is how a woman
in her early 20s, the "petite, pretty brunette"
the call-girl "Kristen" was content:
to wear a bikini on a boat,
and, later contribute-to
the downfall of a man.
Where was HER sense of character?
>Shades of Gary Hart, and Donna Rice all over again!
When the photos were released
in the late '80s:
of her sitting in his lap
on a yacht, that cost him his campaign.
>What is happening-to younger, American women?
That doing music videos and using their bodies
is okay as a path-to success? That being a
Monica Lewinsky "don't hit your head on the desk"
intern is somehow-okay as a way-to advance?
>I would like-to see: some culpability
FOR THE WOMEN whom contributed-to
the downfall of a man,
as-in playing-upon
the weak side of his character.
>The Emperors Club, VIP: is one example of how
men are played-upon for their weaknesses.
The sadness
to the Spitzer tragedy
is almost-akin
to Adam & Eve.
Online-escort services play upon
the weaknesses of men,
like male clientele,
no matter what the fee.
>We, as a nation,
need-to be focusing upon:
developing CHARACTER
in young women,
and restoring character
in older men whom may have become jaded
as politicians.
>The nightmare that became real
to Mr. Spitzer
as a former prosecutor:
is probably-becoming a nightmare
to many prosecutors--
one hooker, and one,
one-night-stand
to ruin him, HIS career.
>Can't we do better as a nation:
than licking our chops
at the downfall of others?
Why don't we do a better job:
at monitoring the flaws
of Big Business?
How is it, that we,
as a nation,
have come-to worship money so?
>Hopefully, Mr. Spitzer and his corporate-lawyer
wife, Silda: will quietly regroup, and reinvent
themselves. They certainly have the Harvard
pedigree to do so. Perhaps they need-to
cultivate friends in high places?
Thanks for this platform.
I take issue with both colleague Dershowitz and Clive Cook.
The original reasoning to pursue the matter, I was led to believe, and seems positively appropriate, was to investigate whether the Governor was the victim of blackmail and extortion.
The transfer of money from the Governor's personal bank account(s) to non personal corporate bank account(s), possibly out of state or even offshore seemingly deserved that heightened scrutiny both the bank, the IRS and the FBI gave it.
Whether the Governor was the victim of blackmail now or at any time in the past as a result of his activities and whether he was at any time compromised in his capacity to, in the past, investigate, or in the present, to legislate as an elected official, still very much remains to be seen.
The issue of whether the Governor's activity is a private activity or whether even this form of activity should even be legalized is actually totally irrelevant to my understanding of protecting the electorate, and that my fiends, is the issue.
Thank you,
The Natural Channel.
Yeh the feds we're fascinated with what's in Eliot spitzer'sd pants.
But Why?
Why do they love it so?
This ain't 1907?
Who cares if the man wants to get laid?
The Feds need to abswer for their fascination with sex?
Let's be honest here.
Why do they care so?
Is everyone in the Federal government sexual repressed?
Because they sure do act like it.
Grow up!
Let the voters of New York decide and not some disturb prosecutor who's hung up on Eliot Spitzer's penis.
Yeh the feds were fascinated with what's in Eliot spitzer's pants.
But Why?
Why do they love it so?
This ain't 1907?
Who cares if the man wants to get laid?
The Feds need to answer for their fascination with sex?
Let's be honest here.
Why do they care so?
Is everyone in the Federal government sexual repressed?
Because they sure do act like it.
(ha!
I'm laughing over here!)
Grow up!
Let the voters of New York decide and not some disturb prosecutor who's hung up on Eliot Spitzer's penis.
3:14 you are an ass!
You are going to blame the young woman? Really?
It's her fault the man couldn't control his penis? Really? She has the character fault?
As for calling this a victimless crime..really?
His daughters? His Wife? Albany politics? The Democrats? The people who worked on his campaign? They are not victims?
Blame the girl? Really? This is a society that criminalizes battered women, and a society that still objectifies women and supports a system that would pay a woman $2000 to give a blow job, but if she wanted to be a nurse...she could not afford to live with out having someone pay her to give a blow job.
So please, take your dirty blame and shove it.
This is a Princeton, Harvard Grad, a Governor who fought prostitution rings....and then went to one. There is one "wrong doer" here and that is Mr. Spitzer. And yet arrogant hypocrisy was his biggest crime - having sex with a 22 year old and having 3 daughters and his wife...is just disgusting - but according to poster 3/14 poor poor men can't control themselves so we women have to dance around them and make sure they stay in line?
Grow up!
A Tsunami is a tragedy!
A weak pathetic man paying to use his penis because he is too weak to control it...is sad, but not a tragedy!
The first post here is a joke right? Please tell me?
Or is that a man who's woman wasn't help to keep him off the computer? Damn her!
This is not about sex, and personally as a woman I could careless what fullfills him and what he needs to get his "rocks off"...I have continued to read with great interest his "resignation", through reports by the press and it is my opinion through experiance that the FBI are not so much concerned with those indiscretions but a much bigger case that he may or maynot be linked to and we must let them do the job that we pay for them to do, as public servants, as public corruption is in the top four of what they fight because it breaks down the foundation of what our country is based on...and their job is to "serve and protect" not "inprison and enslave"..
FEMALE -
Your anger at the economics of our country is fully justified -- hookers can make as much as bankers, for God's sake -- but you need to recognize that every measure to abolish prostitution only makes this problem worse.
Blaming men for their sexual desires, which will always exist, is every bit as senseless as blaming women who sell their services to sexually frustrated men. It's not called the oldest profession for nothing, and attempts to prohibit it only make it a bigger-stakes, higher-drama game than it already is.
Let's not let our fascination with sex or our schadenfreude with respect to the fall of a hyposcrite make us lose sight of the real point here: our laws ARE dangerously overbroad and therefore succeptible of capricious enforcement.
It takes real political courage for lawmakers to stand up and demand that these sorts of laws be scaled back appropriately. But unfortunately, we as a country tend to put our trust in charlatans like Spitzer, who pander to the ignorant with their moral crusading, when we should be electing people with the guts to make sensible laws and enforce them equitably.
Whomever did this to him did a much better job than he did when he tried to railroad Senator Bruno, which even Sheldon Silver found disgraceful. Even his own party distrusted him.
Of course we exult in Spitzer's downfall: he wa a dumb, sanctimonious schmuck!
Sex, Lies and Schadenfreude
Prostitution is an exchange of good and services between two consenting adults. The only externalities that occur if the adults in question have loved ones. However, society as a whole does suffer from it. Thus it should be legal.
Our fascination with this case is just another symptom of the envy economics gripping this nation. This social disease does have deleterious consequences to this society as embodied by the Huffington Post, Lou Dobbs, and any one listening to right wing radio.
That is why the left wing wants to bring success down to their level by raising taxes, while the right wing wants to ensure that no one subrpasses their level of success by curbing immigration.
The posts that trivialize and minimize Spitzer's activities are nauseating. This biological explaination of the "needs" of men is morally bankrupt and speaks volumes about the liberal point of view. Sure, people cheat on their spouses every day (yes,I said cheat!); that doesn't make it right. I guess wedding vows are meaningless, and simply obligatory formalities. It's one thing for John Smith to get caught with his pants down, but a public servant, democrat or republican, should be held accountable for his actions.
As far as Dershowitz is concerned, he is a scumbag. He combs the planet looking to defend other scumbags for what he believes to be their right to be scumbags, and engage in scumbag behavior. He is a waste of a clean suit.