I’m hoping he will. It’s long overdue to beat up Garcia, and I’m looking forward to it.

Ultimately, the DOJ found evidence of a crime. But that’s an after the fact justification, used to obfuscate whether there was an adequate basis to launch an investigation in the first place. From what’s been disclosed to so far, Scott Horton doesn’t think there was.

Moreover, the judgment that allocated such substantial federal resources to investigate what is normally a state beef is appalling. Especially given that that same “judgment” ignores hundreds of crimes of violence and fraud in Iraq, which are uniquely under the jurisdiction of the DOJ, and ignores most sexual (and other) prostitution in its own back yard. “Selective prosecution” is the kindest description I can think of.

As with the prosecution itself, it would be appropriate were it not so uniquely discriminatory and so hypocritical, observations the Times’ extensive reporting somehow fails to make.

If FBI/DOJ are going to claim that the original SAR came from the Emperor’s club, why aren’t the FBI/DOJ investigating/prosecuting more hookers? What was unique about the Emperor Club’s “suspicious activity” relative to other whore houses?

The answer to this is because DOJ is a tool of the Rove legacy and it has laregely been converted with unlimited resources into a machine to go after democrats. It was interested in hookers in this situation because Spitzer was involved. He fit their profile. He was a Democrat in high office.

This is hardly a routine SARS pickup as LHP tried to explain over at the Lake in little golden book terms. If you believe it was, then you must believe Telcom immunity is for your protection.

This was distortion of the financial transaction laws for pure political purposes period. Nothing else. Had Spitzer not been one of the individuals involved there would have been no goofy kabuki dance with a grand jury used to investigate, followed by a complaint laced with wiretap transcripts and affidavits carefully leaked. If you want to talk structuring, the structuring was done by Mike Garcia and his superiors at DOJ and their superiors in the West Wing for maximum publicity to bring Spitzer down.

At this point, I would love to see Garcia dumb enough to indict Spitzer. My message to Garcia would be “Bring it punk. We’ll flay your illegal use of SWIFT open for the world to see.”

The FBI and DOJ are supposed to use their resources in the GWOT. Why did it take them two-years to figure out this was about sex and not Islamofacsists?

Based on the evidence so far, it looks like FBI/DOJ preferred to use my tax dollars chase high priced hookers than al-queda and the Taliban.

If FBI/DOJ are going to claim that the original SAR came from the Emperor’s club, why aren’t the FBI/DOJ investigating/prosecuting more hookers? What was unique about the Emperor Club’s “suspicious activity” relative to other whore houses?

From Bmaz:

So did Mukasey’s memo tell the troops to go forth and run their yaps like fucking teenage schoolgirls? Because if not, there ought to be some terminations, and maybe some GJ secrecy investigations coming immediately and publicly; lest they not ask for more from Spitzer than they do themselves….

Yeah, I think they have some potential major problems with the warrant affidavits. You would have to attack the affidavits on their face, but they are not looking all that good to me. For one, they didn’t sufficiently establish the requisite prongs of knowledge basis and reliability/veracity of the CI (they call a “CS”; same difference to me) and, as you indicate, under the current story, the CI is key. Two, I think they were extremely disingenuous with the court as to the true nature and purpose of what they were investigating, both on the affidavit for the Jan. 8 order and,as i said above, I suspect the Feb. 11 order. Three, thats before the defense has even joined the fray; there will be a whole lot more if a defense pro starts dissecting the thing. Judges are flaky these days, but cognizable arguments are already there, they would appear to be only going to get stronger.

I think Bmaz raised a very significant question on the warrant timing, and if I remember correctly LHP was probably mulling that as well when she wanted links for the warrant timing.

If I were running some aspects of the media, and obviously I’m not, I’d like to put Bmaz and Mary on KO for the next few nights and make listening compulsory for indifferent America. The story is still early in the news cycle, but it is frustrating to see the media so obtuse on the signficant legal questions and red flags as to really a cascade of serious errors in judgement in this whole case by DOJ.

This wasn’t an exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my perception; it was instead a medical grand rounds as to what happens when someone performs a lobotomy on people at Main Justice and Mike Gracia.

I don’t expect people like Larry King and the “local detective” to pick up on any of these nuances, and although she may know about them don’t expect Linda Fairstein to focus on these issues either.