Great Sting or Abuse of Trust
Bob:
Scott Horton is one of my favorite commentators. Here he raises questions reminiscent of the Nixon era enemies list. While the American public willingly like lemmings will through privacy and the 4th amendment out the window to gain their security, our govenment continues its march to gain access to any and all information about anyone. Always couched as a necessary power to stop drug lords, terrorist and other bad guys, the rest of us give up our privacy.
No doubt it is ironic that Spitzer got hoisted on his on petard, but as you read this article ask yourself, how is a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) intiated and once filed, even if the originally claimed activity is found benign, does the statute allow the IRS or Federal Government to root around in all the financial affairs of the target without a warrant?
Scott Horton, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Monday a friend gave me a copy of a memorandum (pdf) that Attorney General Michael Mukasey had circulated inside the Justice Department admonishing staff about how to deal with politically sensitive cases. "They must be about to bag another big-time Democrat," my friend said, jokingly. Perhaps it wasn't a joke. Within hours the wires were burning with reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring.
In New York , the tabloid press and comedians are having a field day with the sudden, spectacular fall of Eliot Spitzer. He had been cast as a Democratic remake of Thomas E. Dewey, the state's legendary Republican prosecutor-governor. Under his leadership, Democrats were increasingly confident of breaking a logjam in Albany by wresting the state senate from the Republicans, who viewed Spitzer as a mortal threat. But Monday's disclosures linking Spitzer to a prostitution ring brought the state to a standstill, and he announced his resignation Wednesday morning....
...All of this makes for excellent copy, particularly for the cable news networks and other outlets that feed off just this sort of tale of personal fall. But there may well be a story-behind-the-story. How did the case against Spitzer get launched? Was he brought down by a politically motivated investigation?
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
The way prosecutorial power is wielded divides a real democracy from a banana republic.
The story emerging around the fall of Eliot Spitzer suggests that the case did not start with the report of a crime. Rather it started with a decision to look into Spitzer and his financial dealings. In the course of an open-ended investigation, information about a prostitution circle surfaced. That looks abusive. An investigation like that provides no basis to acquit Spitzer. But it suggests that when his case is done, the public should be pressing some tough questions about why this investigation was launched and pushed forward.
Specifically, the official narrative suggests that a Long Island bank noticed an odd pattern of payments made by Spitzer between different accounts. The payments were not enormous sums and the bank is said to have been concerned that a large number of transfers were made so as to fall below the $10,000 reporting threshold. The Los Angeles Times reports that Spitzer asked that his name be taken off the money wires, which reportedly aroused suspicion. The bank submitted a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the IRS. The payments which totaled up to $80,000, looked suspicious, we are told, and were examined on the basis that they might be an effort to money-launder bribes. This was reported to the IRS in Hauppauge, Long Island , which in turn involved the Public Integrity Section in the Department of Justice.
Spitzer's request that his name be removed could have been a legitimate trigger for an SAR. But there are some fair questions as to the claims about bribes. Thanks to his father's real estate fortune, Spitzer is an extremely wealthy man, and his channeling of payments at the level suggested can hardly be viewed as something that raises legitimate suspicion. As money laundering goes, $40,000 to $80,000 is peanuts--not the sort of thing that would normally raise an eyebrow. Here it is not the sum involved that triggered suspicion; it is the person who made the payments. Similarly, the suggestion that these payments might have been bribe payments which were being laundered is absurd. In fact they were payments made by Spitzer, not receipts. The facts offered barely meet a plausibility test. Most significantly, there was no basis to suspect bribery--which is what ostensibly launched the entire probe. Several reports about this case have suggested that it is somehow routine for prosecutors to go through the financial records of public officials to look for evidence of corruption. But in the absence of specific grounds justifying the investigation (for instance, an informant complaining about a bribe) prosecutors have no such authority. In this case, the basis for action is extraordinarily weak. Most importantly, the investigators do not appear to be looking into a crime, they appear to be investigating Spitzer in the hopes of finding something compromising.
Scott Horton is one of my favorite commentators. Here he raises questions reminiscent of the Nixon era enemies list. While the American public willingly like lemmings will through privacy and the 4th amendment out the window to gain their security, our govenment continues its march to gain access to any and all information about anyone. Always couched as a necessary power to stop drug lords, terrorist and other bad guys, the rest of us give up our privacy.
No doubt it is ironic that Spitzer got hoisted on his on petard, but as you read this article ask yourself, how is a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) intiated and once filed, even if the originally claimed activity is found benign, does the statute allow the IRS or Federal Government to root around in all the financial affairs of the target without a warrant?
Scott Horton, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Monday a friend gave me a copy of a memorandum (pdf) that Attorney General Michael Mukasey had circulated inside the Justice Department admonishing staff about how to deal with politically sensitive cases. "They must be about to bag another big-time Democrat," my friend said, jokingly. Perhaps it wasn't a joke. Within hours the wires were burning with reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring.
In New York , the tabloid press and comedians are having a field day with the sudden, spectacular fall of Eliot Spitzer. He had been cast as a Democratic remake of Thomas E. Dewey, the state's legendary Republican prosecutor-governor. Under his leadership, Democrats were increasingly confident of breaking a logjam in Albany by wresting the state senate from the Republicans, who viewed Spitzer as a mortal threat. But Monday's disclosures linking Spitzer to a prostitution ring brought the state to a standstill, and he announced his resignation Wednesday morning....
...All of this makes for excellent copy, particularly for the cable news networks and other outlets that feed off just this sort of tale of personal fall. But there may well be a story-behind-the-story. How did the case against Spitzer get launched? Was he brought down by a politically motivated investigation?
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
The way prosecutorial power is wielded divides a real democracy from a banana republic.
The story emerging around the fall of Eliot Spitzer suggests that the case did not start with the report of a crime. Rather it started with a decision to look into Spitzer and his financial dealings. In the course of an open-ended investigation, information about a prostitution circle surfaced. That looks abusive. An investigation like that provides no basis to acquit Spitzer. But it suggests that when his case is done, the public should be pressing some tough questions about why this investigation was launched and pushed forward.
Specifically, the official narrative suggests that a Long Island bank noticed an odd pattern of payments made by Spitzer between different accounts. The payments were not enormous sums and the bank is said to have been concerned that a large number of transfers were made so as to fall below the $10,000 reporting threshold. The Los Angeles Times reports that Spitzer asked that his name be taken off the money wires, which reportedly aroused suspicion. The bank submitted a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the IRS. The payments which totaled up to $80,000, looked suspicious, we are told, and were examined on the basis that they might be an effort to money-launder bribes. This was reported to the IRS in Hauppauge, Long Island , which in turn involved the Public Integrity Section in the Department of Justice.
Spitzer's request that his name be removed could have been a legitimate trigger for an SAR. But there are some fair questions as to the claims about bribes. Thanks to his father's real estate fortune, Spitzer is an extremely wealthy man, and his channeling of payments at the level suggested can hardly be viewed as something that raises legitimate suspicion. As money laundering goes, $40,000 to $80,000 is peanuts--not the sort of thing that would normally raise an eyebrow. Here it is not the sum involved that triggered suspicion; it is the person who made the payments. Similarly, the suggestion that these payments might have been bribe payments which were being laundered is absurd. In fact they were payments made by Spitzer, not receipts. The facts offered barely meet a plausibility test. Most significantly, there was no basis to suspect bribery--which is what ostensibly launched the entire probe. Several reports about this case have suggested that it is somehow routine for prosecutors to go through the financial records of public officials to look for evidence of corruption. But in the absence of specific grounds justifying the investigation (for instance, an informant complaining about a bribe) prosecutors have no such authority. In this case, the basis for action is extraordinarily weak. Most importantly, the investigators do not appear to be looking into a crime, they appear to be investigating Spitzer in the hopes of finding something compromising.
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