Palast Links Spitzer Sting To Big Bank Bailout By: Mark W Adams

The minute the salacious news hit that the F.B.I. was wiretapping Eliot Spitzer, and all they came up with was the Governor's dalliance with some high priced prostitutes, I smelled a rat.

Prostitution is a state crime. So why was the federal government involved?

Sure, you look hard enough and you can catch someone who's trying to hide something embarrassing at ... something, like the antiquated Mann Act. After all, how much time and how many millions of dollars were invested in in Ken Starr's witch-hunt before a crime was all but manufactured to pin on Bill Clinton.

The idea that he transferred too much money at one time to the wrong shell company seems a plausible enough explanation, at least on the surface. It also gave rise to a possible federal "structuring" charge. But seriously, they really went after this guy, and made sure we knew who "Client 9" was despite his name being withheld in the official charges.

So who stood to gain the most from Spitzer's fall? Who would want Spitzer's private hell to be "hotter than anybody else's?"

Face it, if our overly politicized justice department was genuinely concerned that Spitzer may have been the victim of some underworld blackmail scheme, why didn't they just approach the Governor and ask if he needed help? Likewise, if they thought they might have stumbled onto some kind of corruption, they could easily have gone to the governor and pressured him to turn on any co-conspirators -- the uh, real criminals.

No, they knew Eliot was up to something naughty, and wanted to nail him for it. Somebody at Justice found someone at the New York Times with as much integrity as Judy Miller, and "leaked" the name of Client 9. Somebody at the Times decided that a headline saying "Spitzer was caught with a hooker" wasn't nearly as productive as saying he was "linked to a prostitution ring." They didn't just want to expose a crime here. They wanted Spizer destroyed.

Come on. Didn't they make it sound more like he was a pimp and not a john? And wasn't that exactly what the headline writers at the NY Times wanted? This was overkill.

The ever astute Christy Hardin Smith noticed that someone, probably many someones, were cooperating with the government for quite some time, which is why the original charges were filed via information and not a grand jury proceeding. Bottom line, we know way too much, way too soon about Eliot Spizter's sex life. No reporter dug for the facts here. It was handed to them, and so was a pat answer on why the Fed's got involved at all.

If this is a government source for these reports, that says to me that someone wants this story out there in spades.

Knowing that the U.S. Justice Department has pretty much operated as a goon squad for the Republican National Committee, it's next to impossible not to conclude there wasn't a political motivation to watch Spitzer so closely, but I didn't anticipate that there was more to it than the "D" after his name.

Greg Palast thinks otherwise.

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

How could we forget the horror of finding out that Spitzer's liaison with "Kristen" was the day before Valentine's day. Oh, the tragedy for his long suffering spouse. Did you wonder what he was doing in Washington before "ordered out?" Are you curious about the timing of his demise? Did they think Hillary really needed any help throwing her campaign to the gutter?

It's the economy, not the primary, stupid.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

The Wall Street moguls assembled today to hear the imparted wisdom of His Fecklessness to "have confidence" in his miserable economy (after he's done such a heckuvajob so far) are certainly resting a bit more comfortably as they listen to Bush propose, well ... nothing really at all.

They are more confident today than they were last week. Not that the economy will improve anytime soon, but that they won't end up in jail for causing the mess in the first place.