Look at the guy, you can see why he's breaking out his billfold to play hide-the-salami.

Did warrantless wiretapping play a role, however distant? (SigInt picked up, some information passed to someone verbally, passed to someone else...)

How would we ever know?

Hmmm. Wonder how all those corruption cases on republicans are going? There does seem to be a difference in speed.

so, the wiretap was renewed the day before it snagged spitzer?

Spitzer was Client 9? Egads, he must have been one of their first customers. Wonder who the 8 are that got in (no pun intended) ahead of him.

Thank God *someone* is making sure that the American people are safe from...well, something.

Why is it that conservatives love to talk about "less government" until the issue is sex or drugs? Then, we evidently need immediate government involvement, lest people get the misguided impression that they can make their own choices on issues of personal conduct.

Having said that, the guy is the Gov (or soon-to-be ex-Gov) of New York. If he couldn't exercise better judgment, I can't summon up too much pity. Too bad. I liked Spitzer, and am sorry to see him go.

The Bush gang wants retroactive immunity for themselves and the telecoms because they were spying on their political enemies, you're seeing one of them in Spitzer.

What was it one of Bush's top officials said, Comey?: "If this ever gets out...." and, weren't a lot of Justice officials ready to resign over this spying?

From the desk of:

Mark Poison Penn

Re: Spitzer Sex Scandal:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wants the voters to know that she has the most experience to deal with such a unexpected emergency. Senator Clinton has past the threshold of being qualified to deal with Bimbo Eruptions, from day one. Experience counts. At 3.00am who do you want answering those phone calls from the Red Light Zone.

Hillary Clinton has 35 years of experience dealing with Bimbo Eruptions, and Senator Obama has never even made a speech about them.

Who do you want taking that 3.00AM Red Light call!

Eliot Spitzer has been both a customer and a protector of organized crime since he was a prosecutor and NY Attorney General. This press release shows that Spitzer ignored the death threat by an attorney, admitted before a civil judge, in order to protect organized crime in bankruptcy courts known as "bankruptcy rings" which Congress sought to fight since the early 1900s. www.lawyersunregulated.blogspot.com Spitzer was owned by criminals. Look at the similar patterns of fraud that happened in Worldcom, Enron, and eToys. Look at the admitted death threat in Worldcom Only Martha Stewart, rap stars, and baseball stars go to prison for such crimes, lawyers who are connected with organized crime merely manipulate the corrupted government officials that they own. Sorry to say that the U.S.A. is permeated with public corruption at the highest levels of our government in law enforcement and the Judiciary. Hey Barack Obama: Are you really for "change", or are you just a "new boss, same as the old boss"?

Wow, $5,500 a time? That's only $500 more than Alberto Gonzalez demanded for expenses when he spoke at a local university. (He got $30,000 for his speaking fee.)

Peace,
Paul

Oh my Eliott, thanks for cementing the image of politicians as stupid, self centered power mongers who screw everyone except their wives. Can we now expect Republican Senator David Vitter to resign as well for the exact same indiscretion? Or how about Senator "Wide Stance" Larry Craig but for the fact he likes to screw men in bathrooms? I thought so. Hippocrates are us, one and all. FauxNews should be fair and balanced about this...

just point of information, I read all the docs, he paid $3500 for the night, including paying for her to come down from NYC by train. The extra $2k was a deposit towards future use, because the Spitz found it difficult to pay, didn't use credit cards and actually had to mail the money ahead of time no return address for this gig so they asked him to put some cash on deposit. Obviously not Spitz' first rodeo so to speak.

Will Senator Clinton return his money and condemn his behavior? Boy am I glad at least Obama was far far away from this. Just what we need -- another high level Democratic alpha male with a zipper problem.

Dave Patterson is a great guy -- the first governor with a severe disability (He's blind.)
I do love NYYYYY.

Can we expect a decrease in fees for VIP escorts now that the high-rollers have stopped bidding up the market? /;^)

One out of a hundred adults in America are in jail or prison. As a minority, I venture to say that, most likely, one out of ten of our politicians belong behind bars... or at the least... disbarred.

Too bad they are the ones making the ethics, misdemeanor, and felony regulations and penalties for themselves...

We need to throw them ALL out and give a new set of mobsters a chance... IMHO

It's not any significant party that does wrong doings, it's the nature of the beast of politics.

Too much power and prestige is given to our politicians and they eat it up!!

Are you really surprised?

I'm not surprised at all!

I have pity, but not for Spitzer. For me. I admired him.

my armchair psychoanalysis: it isn't strictly about needing sex with prostitutes. I always sensed something fetishistic about the way in which Spitzer (who I've voted for every time he's run for anything, the very first primary included) went after white collar criminals. It seems to me he likely has and has always had a neurotic obsession with cheating and getting away with things which leads him to both go after cheaters and to cheat himself, obviously in ridiculously circuitous and elaborate ways that end up creating a trail rather than obscuring one. If I am right, then this is probably not an isolated incident.

I never saw the point of prostitution being illegal but in this instance, when you have a career in law enforcement at the highest echelons, you can't break the law, even a dumb law. He's got to go.

Illegal wiretaps?

Bush's stupidity may be Spitzer's Carte Blanc.

McCain/Clinton '08

waybackmachine

http://web.archive.org/web/*/emperorsclubvip.com

Maybe we are all rushing to judgement. Instead of projecting the idea that the former Attorney General, Governor of New York was paying thousands of dollars having anal sex with his escort maybe instead he was counseling her on safe sex. Instead of the Governor spanking this young lady and calling her naughty; maybe he was just having coffee and spending quality time discussing horticulture.

As it stands now, there is no evidence of threesomes, illegal sex toys, inflatible dolls, double dongs, or handcuffs.

This is about the political assassination of a human being who believes that government has a bona fide role to play in protecting its citizens against greedy bastards who are shitting on the Constitution.

As for the sex, all you Pavlovian dogs are doing exactly the job you've been conditioned to do: ignore the real issue for the fake one.

Sad but inevitable about Eliot and the ho. Too bad about Larry and the men's room. Clinton and Monica etc., etc.. They really are a bunch of deceitful criminals. Tut tut.

Hail Bush the alleged but silent former coke snorting reformed drunk driver who was too busy chasing tail to fulfil his duty to the Louisiana national guard but somehow cruised to an hon. discharge anyway and went on to institute the still derigeur policy of pre-emptive continuous war waged with 100% borrowed money, no sacrifice by the general US civilian population and massive collateral death and injury upon a foreign people.

Re-elect the Republicans - let's continue the epic struggle to expose illicit carnality by our public officials! I feel a new day dawning.

My sympathies to Mrs Spitzer. How humiliated this woman must feel.

yes, spitzer let his dick get him in trouble. gee, where have we seen that before? but there's something wrong with the explanations that have been posited so far about this investigation.

allegedly, this investigation was triggered by money transfers, not by the prostitution sting. but according to the accounts I've read, spitzer paid in cash, and he mailed it. I'm sorry, but withdrawing $3K or $4K in cash is not enough to trigger a bank reporting it -- if it were, we'd all be under investigation. (and maybe we are.)

the speed with which this all came down is equally troubling. feb 13 spitzer gets his surfboard waxed, and less than a month later it's all over the headlines. meanwhile, this investigation has been going on since last october?

something is fishy. equally fishy are the dollar amounts. the escort service charges $1K to $5K an hour, they have 50 working girls, and they've made "more than a million in profits" over 4 years? do the math on that one. they'd each have to work about 5 hours a year, at the lower rates, for only $1 mill profit.

no, somebody flipped on spitzer. and when the feds learned who they had on the hook, they reeled in hard. yes, spitzer screwed up. but he also got screwed. that man has a lot of enemies, and they all have friends in the white house.

dt

You can believe that they're high-fiving at the NRCC and the Whitehouse. Spitzer committed the crime, but who put the prostitute in his path? Who got the DOJ to track his financial records? This has got Republican dirty tricks written all over it.

Did you know the President of the United States just vetoed a Bill that makes torture illegal?

Has the Republican politicization of the US Department of Justice ensnared the Democrat Governor of New York?

Here’s one oddity about the complaint. Client–9 (who is Governor Spitzer) is referenced many more times than any other client. Why?

client–1 (16 times)
client–2 (8 times)
client–3 (8 times)
client–4 (18 times)
client–5 (10 times)
client–6 (11 times)
client–7 (5 times)
client–8 (6 times)
client–9 (57 times—Governor Spitzer)
client-10 (7 times)

Why was more attention paid to the Governor than other clients?

We should all wonder whether the complaint was crafted to embarrass Governor Spitzer -- especially after last month’s startling upset election that reduced the Republican margin in the New York Senate to a single seat.

How did they trace cash transfers to/from their destination/origin; and why did DoJ disclose "Client 9" was Spitzer? DOJ OPR, where are you?

DoJ AG approved a prosecution for cash transfers, but won't approve a grand jury to review contempt citations against WH counsel?

>"Another thing that bothers me about this, and bothers me greatly as a former DOJ lawyer. . . "From

For the moment and only discussion purposes only, let's set aside the issue of whether Spitzer violated any laws, or was engaged in illegal conduct. For the sake of discussion only, let's examine Spitzer's assumptions. These were based on what he knew as NY State AG: He transferred money using cash, which shouldn't be traceable.

In Spitzer's mind, he would have done "everything he could" to not get caught only if he narrowly did things he, as NY AG, would know to look at. Going back to the Chertoff comments, it would appear that Spitzer as NY AG, wouldn't have known the details of the NSA monitoring. The apparent one area Spitzer didn't count on, it appears, was the things he, as NY AG, wouldn't know the details: How the NSA domestically monitors phone calls; and how phone call-related evidence is anonymously provided to law enforcement as investigative leads. It's possible Spitzer as NY AG was never told about the methods by which he and other prosecutors were told about how evidence was really developed.

Example

Suppose you have $1M invested in the stock market, evenly in three [3] stocks, $333K each. Suppose, out of the blue, the stock for one company tanks, and you lose $330K; and you sell the other two stocks. The IRS will record the transaction not as a $330K loss, but as a gain of $667K. They don't trace where the money went; they want to know where this 667 came from.

However, if the IRS doesn't get an answer, there's more to the story. The problem with the "IRS suspected something"-argument with Spitzer is that we're only dealing with $80K. The IRS may open an investigation because they "can't explain" the wire transfer. However, what prompted the IRS to press for a full disclosure of the $80K; yet the IRS, without an affidavit or statement under perjury, will close an investigation without determining where the funds went, where they came from?

Something, for this "small" amount which Spitzer was transferring told the IRS to key in on this; but ignore the other "unexplained" funds.

- Why did the IRS know to follow-up with Spitzer; but it ignores larger funds transfers and unexplained wire transfers, as is the case with the example?

- Has this "out of the blue"-evidence related to Spitzer opened a new line of inquiry into the NSA domestic surveillance activities?

- Which came first: The warrantless surveillance by NSA of Spitzer, which provided this information to IRS, DoJ and DHS; or the "out of the blue" IRS examination, based on a bank alert; why is the IRS concerned with funds less than $10K, but they ignore "unexplained" funds which are really residuals from stock losses?

- Is it reasonable to examine "what Spitzer as AG knew" when examining the types of things State Attorney Generals would be alarmed with, notified, or have knowledge of?

- Is the fact that Spitzer got caught, and didn't cover his tracks, evidence that he, as former NY AG, wasn't aware of federal-level-options which even a State Attorney General isn't told?

- Does Spitzer's alleged conduct show us the possible things that the US government is doing which even a State AG has no idea is happening?

- Is is possible to link the [a] State AG privacy lawsuits against the telecoms with [b] the lines of evidence Spitzer didn't know the NSA was domestically collecting?

- To what extent is "Spitzer getting caught using evidence he, as former NY AG didn't know about" a reasonable line of inquiry to examine to what extent NSA is engaged in domestic law enforcement/intelligence gathering which the lead prosecutors in each state are not told?

- Does the NSA regularly watch all domestic phone calls, and did the NSA-DHS-DoJ target all phone calls, and retroactively ask for permission to tap Spitzer's phone, despite them having information only available from the phone call?

- Is the fall out issue: Spitzer was first illegally surveilled; then DoJ-DHS-NSA provided this information to IRS, who then developed a case using illegally captured information?