Some Good Questions on the Spitzer Case

Scott Horton is a really good on ethics issues in Department of Justice. Here he asks sharp questions about the Spitzer investigation. The issue is not that Spitzer hired a prostitute or that he should have stepped down. He did and he should have. The issue is: did the DOJ go after a person, not a crime. Clearly they did, as Horton lays out. Here is the money quote:

The report of the investigation shows that prosecutors and investigators had assembled their case against the prostitution ring by mid-January. But they held back. They were waiting for their true prey, which was not the prostitution ring. They were out for Eliot Spitzer. He apparently booked another transaction on the eve of Valentine’s Day. The allocation of resources for this operation again was massive, and included a stake-out of Spitzer’s hotel room and comprehensive surveillance. Again, the prosecution team was not out after a crime, it was out after a person.

The key questions that need to be asked go to the extraordinary allocation of resources and manpower for this operation and the application of level standards. Here again, the Bush Justice Department has one set of standards when Republican officials fall into a prostitution ring, and an entirely different set when the target is a Democrat who is threatening the Republican Party’s power base in Albany. We just need to look over the “D.C. Madam” case, which caught in its snare a high-level official of the Bush Administration and a Republican senator. But the Bush Justice Department’s attitude towards that case couldn’t be more different. It is deferential towards the customers and has shown no interest in bringing charges against any of them. It has also engaged in extraordinary somersaults to keep the names of the Republicans caught up in the case out of the media. The two cases, compared with care, point convincingly to a partisan political double standard.

The Bush Justice Department complains it has no resources to investigate or deal with the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a woman from Houston who was gang-raped, brutalized and held hostage by American contractors in Iraq. It claims it has no resources to deal with dozens of similar cases involving rape and assault by or against U.S. citizens. It has no resources to deal with hundreds of cases involving massive contract fraud, tallying into the billions of dollars, in Iraq. Its prosecution of white-collar crime across the country has fallen through the floor. But this same Justice Department allocates millions in resources to ensnare a prominent Democratic politician in a sex tryst at the Mayflower Hotel. This evidences an extremely curious set of priorities—priorities which are suspiciously driven by a partisan politics, not a sober and responsible interest in law enforcement.