Pee-Yew!
11 March 2008 12:31 am by Taylor Marsh
 |
| by Paul Szep |
As I wrote earlier, Republican David Vitter is still in the Senate, and so is Larry
Craig. So what’s up with Eliot Spitzer? He might get the stupid award, but seriously.
Why do we care? Or maybe the better question is, what are the Republicans up
to? Things are rarely as they seem.
I don’t trust these developments for an instant. See Scott Horton of Harper’s, who is definitely on to something:
(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.All of these facts are consistent with a process which is not the investigation
of a crime, but rather an attempt to target and build a case against an individual.The answer of the Justice Department to all this is likely to be: Trust us.
But in the current environment, the reservoir of trust is tapped. The Justice
Department needs to submit to some questions about how this probe got launched,
who launched it, and to what extent political appointees were involved in
its direction. 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.
