We bagged a governor

There are some troubling aspects of the Eliot Sptizer case. First some comments from Robert Jackson, described as "the greatest Attorney General of the last century" (I don't know under which president he served):

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.

This looks to be the case with Spitzer. This analysis is from Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University and has a blog at Harper's Magazine. The investigation didn't start with prostitution, but with "suspicious" money transfers, thought to be money laundering. But the amount of money is small to be a laundering effort and not all that out of line for a man as rich as Spitzer. This was turned over to the IRS, which now has an astonishing record of politically motivated investigations. The IRS turned it over to the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, now known for launching 5 investigations of Democrats for every one launched of Republicans. This was a "routine" examination of bank records but it prompted a huge allocation of resources to investigate it, in stark contrast to Vitter in which the DoJ never seems to have enough resources to investigate. That means the DoJ wasn't investigating a crime, they were investigating the person in hopes of finding a crime. The way the story was teased into the press was done for maximum humiliation of Spitzer, enough to keep him out of public office, above and beyond what would be appropriate for the nature of his crime. How nice that the GOP was able to bag a governor.