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Was Eliot Spitzer targeted?

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Richard Clark
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    Considering that the official account claims this was a "routine" examination of bank records, the level of resources allocated to it, including investigators and prosecutors, was quite lavish. This again suggests a politically motivated prosecution, which usually takes the form of a generous allocation of resources for political targets. Clearly, moving the case against Spitzer had become a politically-based priority.

 

    Two more questions should be asked about the prosecution. The first is whether a selective attitude is taken in prosecution -- that is, whether the Justice Department is treating Spitzer in a manner consistent with other (notably Republican) figures caught in similarly compromised positions. The second is how the matter was broken to the press.

 

    On each of these points, the information now available raises unsettling issues about the conduct of the Justice Department. Example: A case somewhat similar to that of Spitzer involved a prostitution investigation of the "D.C. Madam." In that case, federal prosecutors had proceeded against the prostitution ring yet showed little interest in the customer list, which included a former high-ranking Bush Administration official (Randall Tobias, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development) and a U.S. Senator (David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana). The prosecutors' conduct in the "D.C. Madam" case was remarkably deferential to the public figures involved. So why the double standard when it’s a Democrat that gets caught in the net?

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c5005f31-237e-4f9d-bca1-891c7aa2b7b2

 

    Finally, look at how the investigation got started. There is no dispute that Spitzer’s alleged attempt to keep his money transfers under the $10,000 reporting threshold would have been a justifiable basis for the bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). Problem is, Spitzer’s transfers were in the four and five thousand dollar range, and that is nothing unusual for a multimillionaire like Spitzer. Nevertheless, these wire transfers were quickly reported to the IRS, and the IRS immediately put this info into the hands of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice.


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Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've (more...)
 

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