Spitzer: a Victim of Police State Tactics
In this old blog post, I jokingly suggested that Eliot Spitzer be threatened with indictment in order to force him to resign due to his serial abuses of power. Well, this is ultimately what it took. And despite the irony that this is the same tactic Spitzer used on others (and as much as I think Spitzer got what he deserved), Spitzer's demise is just another example of prosecutorial abuse. Several libertartians have made this observation on the LRC site. Interestingly, their views are echoed on the Left by Alan Dershowitz in the March 13 Wall Street Journal (The Entrapment of Eliot):
Even if Mr. Spitzer's derelictions were serendipitously discovered as a result of routine, computerized examination of bank transactions, the dangers inherent in selective use of overbroad criminal statutes remain. Money laundering, structuring and related financial crimes are designed to ferret out organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and large-scale financial manipulation. They were not enacted to give the federal government the power to inquire into the sexual or financial activities of men who move money in order to hide payments to prostitutes.
Once federal authorities concluded that the "suspicious financial transactions" attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It's simply none of the federal government's business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes."
If they wanted to, the Feds could have busted this prostitution ring quickly and easily with little fanfare. Instead, they wiretapped 5000 phone calls and read 6000 private emails to find salacious details about Spitzer that they could leak to the press. Sickening.
Comments (12)
>Sickening.
Yeah, it sounds like something... Attorney General Eliot Spitzer would have done!
Published: March 15, 2008 12:05 AM
I found this column:
The Universal Spitzer
http://tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=031408A
Published: March 15, 2008 5:02 AM
This good article makes me think a lot of Robespierre, founding fater of the French revolution, fighting for the freedom of the people.
Robespierre was perhaps the first politician so much outspoken against death penalty, but then he grew so passionate (crazy) about freedom that he ended up killing all his opponents!
Published: March 16, 2008 5:36 AM
You can see the giant cleft between Liberterians, Real "Liberals" and those using the name like Dershowitz. That is Liberterians believe the law has gone too far and it is simply a tool for the federal government to trap and imprision anyone it chooses. Dershowitz thinks that the benevolent government should just stop in its tracks now that it is on the hunt.
The only answer to respect the liberty of citizens is to cancel these laws at both the state and federal levels.
Published: March 16, 2008 9:49 AM
Poetic justice, the biter bit, hoist with his own petard...
I agree that the Federal Government has gone way beyond its constitutional authority. Many of these laws were aimed at "Organized Crime" or the "war?? on drugs". The moral of the story is that when you deprive anyone of their rights, you deprive EVERYBODY of their rights, not just John Gotti. The justice system in our country has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the entertainment industry and is infested by politics. We see people such as Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby going to prison for non-crimes.
However, what makes things interesting here is that ELLIOTT SPITZER is (or at least was) THE STATE!
Published: March 16, 2008 1:59 PM
I really don't get what the fuss about Spitzer is. So he cheated on his wife ; so he engaged in hypocritical activities ; so he paid thousands of dollars to women for pleasure. The only outrage I feel is toward an intrusive federal government , which thinks that it has a right to demand that we justify our financial activities to it. Whether I carry one penny or ten thousand dollars in my pocket is none of the federal government's business and I should NEVER have to justify myself to a federal agent as to why I am carrying or transferring a certain amount of legal tender.
The only legitimate possible problem I could see in Spitzer's conduct is if he was using state funds , not his own personal income , for these forays.
Published: March 16, 2008 8:15 PM
News reports indicated the Spitzer was notified on the Friday before the news came out. We do not know if he was offered a deal or if he became arrogant or did something to anger the Feds.
I do not think this was prosecutorial abuse. I do think that he was treated the same way he treated others. How many lives did he ruin with his overzealous prosecutorial abuse? He was a victim of his own doing.
Or, is it OK to use prosecutorial abuse if your crusade is "moral"?
Published: March 16, 2008 8:39 PM
What ever happened to law enforcement officials being held to the highest standards? How many times does a prosecutor, faced with a jury sympathetic to someone guilty of a peccadillo "everyone" indulges in, argues the whole "respect for the law" line? I don't care when the average Joe sleeps with a prostitute. But when a holier-than-thou, publicity seeking, no-holds-barred prosecutor gets caught with one -- I say crucify him.
Published: March 17, 2008 12:07 PM
Abusers of the public trust and office, ought to be held to higher standards. Not only should Spritzer lose his job, he should pay at least what Joe American would get for the same crime in fines or sentencing, if not worse.
This whole statist gig w/private for profit prisons and the whole WS IPO shares for the privileged few politicians that make the law ergo business - is beyond what we should put up with. Victimless crimes to keep full these for profit prisons & cronies rich, is a conflict of interest as vile as I can think of.
Whats good for the goose, eh?
Published: March 18, 2008 2:47 PM
As humans, we all have basic drives which originate in the primitive part of our brains. What makes us unique is the pfc (prefrontal cortex) of our brains which monitors and supervises our basic drives. Often called the higher part of our brain, the pfc is where critical thinking, forward thinking, empathy, and our ability to weigh the consequences of our actions resides. When it becomes quite clear that a public official has an addiction problem, which results in him or her sacrificing higher priniciples for the pursuit of power and pleasure, that official needs to be removed from office. It has been jokingly suggested that we should have anyone running for public office to submit to a brain scan to determine whether an overactive limbic system and underactive pfc is present. The mere thought of it is scary.
Published: March 19, 2008 11:52 AM
It is quite ironic that Spitzer, that self-proclaimed paragon of virtue, undid his own campaign with his lascivious acts. While I support in theory his efforts to clean up Albany and politics in general, it is now obvious that he was just paying lip service (no pun intended). What is happening in our society that the politicians are becoming criminals, and in fact behaving so far beneath normal decorum that it is almost pathological. In the past we held our politicians to higher standards than the general community -- now even expecting them to behave as normal citizens seems to be too much to ask.
Published: March 22, 2008 1:39 PM
Perhaps it's just the fact that politicians are no longer as good at hiding it as they used to be...
Published: March 22, 2008 4:25 PM