Eliot Spitzer

Spitzer Resigns - It's Time to Impeach Bush

Bob Fertik — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:34:00 -0400

Today Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized again to the people of New York for his personal failings and resigned, just 16 months after winning an historic landslide election with 70% of the vote.

But Spitzer's resignation was not entirely voluntary, because Republican leaders were busy drafting Articles of Impeachment.

What was Spitzer's impeachable offense? The "lowest" crime in the book.

As we know, the Founding Fathers wanted Impeachment to be used for "High Crimes" like treason, bribery, war crimes, and subverting the Constitution itself.

Eliot Spitzer committed no "High Crimes" - but George Bush and Dick Cheney most certainly have, and they continue to do so with absolute impunity.

It's time for Congress to impeach them for it.
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/88?ad=d8

16 months ago, we posted a petition listing 10 High Crimes which justified their impeachment:
(1) Starting a "war of aggression" (2) torture (3) arbitrary detention (4) war crimes (5) warrantless wiretapping (6) signing statements (7) election fraud (8) outing a covert CIA operative (9) the "unitary executive" (10) gross negligence for Katrina and global warming.

Each one of these crimes is as unacceptable today as it was then. There are many more we could add, including Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence to stop him from testifying about the crimes of Bush and Cheney themselves, and Bush's ongoing threats to bomb Iran. And each one makes Spitzer's "crime" utterly insignificant by comparison.

Over 137,000 of you have signed this petition, and we thank you. (If you've forgotten, our form won't let you sign twice.)

But many of you have not. And in the wake of the Republican effort to impeach Eliot Spitzer for the "lowest" crime, every Democrat in America should sign it.

Please tell your Senators and Representative to Impeach Bush and Cheney Now:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/88?ad=d8

And thanks for all you do to make the world a better place.

Rove Gets Spitzer's Scalp

Bob Fertik — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:00:01 -0400

Karl Rove just added another Democratic scalp to his collection: Eliot Spitzer's.

Spitzer has not been charged with any crime. He was railroaded by the Corporate Media, led by Rupert Murdoch's NYPost and FOX News, with Karl Rove's "loyal Bushies" leaking furiously from Bush's InJustice Department.

So what's the standard here? If hiring prostitutes is a disqualification for office, then David Vitter must resign today too. In fact, a good chunk of the men in politics must also resign (and possibly a few women as well). And a bunch of reporters and editors must quit as well. And pundits too - yes I'm talking 'bout you, Dick Toesucker Morris.

If adultery is the standard, then Larry Craig must resign today, along with half the men in politics and the media.

If hypocrisy is the standard, then everyone in politics and the media must resign today, because there isn't one who isn't a hypocrite in some large or small way. Take Saint John McCain on torture, campaign finance, immigration, Iraq, global warming, lobbyists... you name it.

And if a criminal violation is the standard, then George Bush and Dick Cheney should not only resign immediately, they should go before a firing squad for war crimes (invading Iraq and torture) and treason (outing Valerie Plame).

Spitzer Day 2

Bob Fertik — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:53:52 -0400

Since the story broke on Monday, every corporate media headline has included this Big Lie: "Spitzer expected to resign." Well he hasn't, and there's no evidence he will. It looks like the Corporate Media tried to create a story rather than report it. Just another example of media bias against Democrats!

So now Republicans are talking about impeaching him. Impeachment for sex - where have we heard that before? Oh yeah - it was the only news story of 1998.

But what about impeachment for the murder of 4,000 Americans and 1 million Iraqis? What about impeachment for creating chaos in the Middle East and driving the price of oil from $30 to $110, and the price of gas from $1.40 to $4? What about impeachment for creating a Big Brother system to spy on the phone calls, emails, and mouse clicks of every American citizen? What about impeachment for outing a covert CIA operative and exposing herself and her spy network to murder?

Skeptics are starting to look carefully at the charges against Spitzer. What exactly is his crime? In DC, prostitution is a misdemeanor and you pay a fine, just like a speeding ticket. The Mann Act (interstate transport) is never used against johns, just pimps. "Structuring" and "money laundering" don't apply to hiding embarassing payments from your wife.

Skeptics are also asking what's behind the Spitzer investigation. Who tipped off the Feds? Was it a Spitzer-hating banker at Spitzer's own bank? Was Spitzer on an "enemies list" at the IRS? Why is the investigation being handled by the Public Integrity Section, which is at the center of the US Attorney scandal? Why was the investigation opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910?

And there are non-financial theories too. Linda Milazzo asks, Is Spitzer Being Targeted By The Anti-Abortion Right?

Isn't it odd that just when New York Governor Elliott Spitzer has introduced the RHAPP Bill -- the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act -- which guarantees women the right to choose or refuse birth control and abortion, he is simultaneously the subject of a highly publicized sex sting that threatens to destroy his career and possibly send him to prison? ... Spitzer's RHAPP Bill is highly controversial and the blatant target of the Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups nationwide. These groups are relentless in their efforts to thwart a woman's right to choose.

Spitzer Bust Provides a Warning Regarding NSA Spying

dlindorff — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:15:53 -0400

I have no sympathy for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the hot-shot prosecutor of call-girl operations who was hoist on his own petard, as it were. I mean, what a jerk! And aside from the hypocrisy, what a fine message he was sending to his three teenage daughters about the role of women.

Having said that, Spitzer's bust should give pause to those in Congress who are ready to hand President Bush a free pass to continue his six-year campaign of warrantless spying on Americans.

We now know from yesterday's Wall Street Journal article that the spying Bush has been doing through the National Security Agency since early 2001 has included vast computer sweeps of not just internet and phone activity, but also bank and credit card transactions. These are sweeps of ordinary everyday people, with computers looking for odd transactions, or for codewords, or for transactions involving specific targeted organizations or addresses.

What nailed Spitzer, we now learn, was a series of bank transactions he had with the bank account of the Emperor's Club VIP callgirl operation.

Now reportedly, this particular investigation was being conducted by the IRS, which allegedly was investigating the Emperor's Club. Once the IRS discovered it had caught the New York governor in its web, it forwarded the case to the US Attorney General's Office, where it was pursued by the FBI, apparently on the instructions of AG Michael Mukasey. The investigation moved from monitoring the bank to monitoring phones, and Spitzer was captured talking to the Emperor's Club dispatcher. Bingo. Promising Democratic political career ruined.

Now the monitoring of the Emperor's Club was reportedly done with a court-ordered warrant. That's fine.

But this case shows us how people can get caught up by this kind of investigation really quickly.

Now imagine that instead of a call-girl operation, this had been a mosque or an international charity organization, and suppose you were someone who had made a call to ask about making donations to help the victims of the last earthquake in Indonesia? If that mosque, or charity, happened to be on the list of outfits being monitored by the NSA's computers, your call might well have been picked up. Then the focus would shift to your phone and your internet server, and conceivably every communication you made would be watched.

This is the America we now live in. According to the Wall Street Journal, after a wave of national outrage forced the Bush administration to shut down its Total Information Awareness project at the Pentagon, Bush and Cheney simply moved their scheme to subject all telecommunications and bank transactions to computer monitoring over to the NSA.

Since none of this spying activity is subject to court supervision and warrant requirements, we are left having to trust the personnel at the NSA, the so-called Justice Department, and the president and his administration, not to abuse it.

Right. And think of the temptations!

Want to know what the House leadership strategy is regarding renewal of the NSA wiretap authorization? Want to know whether the Congress is serious about imposing a time limit on troops in Iraq? Just start monitoring their emails and phones.

Want to make sure Democratic members of Congress go along with a war on Iran? Just monitor their phones and emails and catch them in conversations that are suitable for a little blackmail.

Is this kind of thing happening? Well, I keep marvelling at the cowardly behavior of leading members of Congress like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Chair John Conyers. Maybe something is being held over their heads.

We know that the prosecution and conviction of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was an administration hit on a popular Democratic official. Siegelman is now in jail. Ditto Wisconsin state employee Georgia Thompson. These blatant political prosecutions certainly weigh on the minds of all Democratic elected officials.

Who, after all, is safe in this kind of environment, where the Bill of Rights has been set aside?

Spitzer, who no doubt made use of phone taps himself in his day, and who was ruthless as New York's attorney general in bringing down many of his own targets, may well deserve what he is getting. But the way he was ensnared, via the secret monitoring of a bank's activity, and via phone taps, should put us all on guard.

With that kind of power, unchecked in the hands of an intensely political administration, it's almost a certainty that it is being used and used inappropriately for political ends.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush Tied to Child Prostitution - Resignation or Impeachment Expected!

Bob Fertik — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:11:39 -0400

George Bush has been tied to a prostitution ring involving as many as 50,000 women and girls and is expected to resign or be impeached, according to Congressional sources.

The prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million desperate Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the U.K. Independent.

Bush's invasion destroyed the Iraqi government and unleashed a wave of political and sectarian violence that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and forced 4 million to become refugees, according to the UN.

Facing starvation, as many as 50,000 women and girls have been forced into prostitution in Syria alone, according to Hana Ibrahim of the Women's Will Association.

"70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis," 23-year-old Abeer told the New York Times. "The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available."

According to the Times, "inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East. In the club's parking lot, nearly half of the cars had Saudi license plates."

Driving women and girls into prostitution violates numerous human rights agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. George Bush himself denounced sex trafficking at the United Nations in 2003.

Bush's invasion of a country that posed no threat to the U.S. was illegal under both U.S. and international law, according to legal experts. Bush has been convicted of war crimes by citizen tribunals around the world, including New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Just las week, the towns of Brattleboro and Marlboro Vermont voted to indict and arrest Bush and Cheney.

In 2002 and 2003, Bush led a propaganda campaign to defraud Congress, the American people, and key allies into believing Iraq was a threat. Bush claimed Iraq had stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to use against the U.S., and was sharing them with Al Qaeda.

Speaking near Rochester NY, Bush later admitted, "See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity, top Bush Administration officials told at least 935 lies about Iraq on 532 separate occasions. These included 259 lies by Bush, 254 lies by Secretary of State Colin Powell, 109 lies by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 109 lies by Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, 56 lies by National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and 48 lies by Vice President Cheney.

The lies about Iraqi WMD's were manufactured by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included the most senior White House staff: White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Jim Wilkinson, Nick Calio, Michael Gerson, and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby.

In July 2003, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed Bush's lie that Iraq sought uranium from Niger in a New York Times op ed. Libby secretly sought retribution against Wilson by revealing the name of his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to several reporters. The scandal led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who won conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was sentenced to to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000, but his jail sentence was commuted by President Bush at the urging of Vice President Cheney to prevent Libby from telling Fitzgerald the truth.

According to George Mason, the "father of the Bill of Rights," it was unquestionably an impeachable offense for a President (or Vice President) to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself."

WHIG was chaired by Bush's propaganda mastermind Karl Rove, who admitted under harsh questioning at the University of Iowa on Monday, "I fully expect to be indicted by the end of the year."

After the invasion, 1,400 experts in the Iraq Survey Group scoured Iraq for WMD's but found none. Charles Duelfer wrote the ISG's final report in September 2004 and concluded Iraq ended its WMD program in 1991.

This publicly confirmed what the CIA had privately known since 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan and told the CIA he had personally overseen the complete destruction of Iraq's WMD after 1991 Gulf War.

In May 2005, the Times of London published the "Downing Street Memo" which revealed Bush's pre-war intelligence was a deliberate fraud, according to Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6 spy agency, who met with George Tenet in July 2002. "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq, Dearlove told a secret meeting of Tony Blair's war cabinet on July 23, 2002, eight months before Bush invaded Iraq.

This publication of the "Downing Street Memo" led to widespread calls for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. John Conyers and other Democrats held preliminary impeachment hearings in the basement of the Capitol on June 16, 2005. In 2006, Conyers published his explosive findings in "George W. Bush Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Downing Street Memos and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Coverups in the Iraq War and Illegal Domestic Spying."

After Democrats won Congress in 2006, Conyers became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and has met repeatedly with impeachment advocates. Despite widespread reports that Speaker Pelosi is blocking Conyers from starting impeachment, Conyers recently declared, "I don't know who's ever stopped me before, I don't know why Pelosi's going to stop me now."

In 2007, Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced three Articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney for his role in the Iraq War lies. Kucinich's bill, H.Res. 333, has 26 co-sponsors.

The bill was debated on the House floor last November the House voted 251-162 to refer it to the Judiciary Committee for further action, rather than kill the bill. (The bill was renamed to H.Res. 799.)

Last December, Rep. Robert Wexler and two other members of the House Judiciary Committee urged Conyers to begin hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. Wexler posted an online petition and collected over 230,000 signatures.

Rep. Kucinich ran for President in 2007 and his calls for impeachment were enthusiastically received by voters. Last week, Kucinich fended off a primary challenge in his Congressional district and is expected to introduce the first Articles of Impeachment against George Bush.

But some in Congress believe Bush and Cheney will resign before they are impeached. "When the American people finally learn the truth about Bush's crimes, Bush and Cheney will have to resign, just like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew," said a key Congressional Democrat. "The pressure on Eliot Spitzer is nothing compared to what we'll see for Bush and Cheney," he added.

The latest polls by Newsweek and AP-Ipsos put Bush's approval rating at 30%, a record low. His disapproval rating is over 60%, a record high, and suggests more Americans now favor Bush's impeachment than in earlier polls which showed strong support for impeachment.

Politician Caught Using Prostitute!

Bob Fertik — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:43:56 -0400

Senator David Vitter is a rightwing Republican from Louisiana who consistently voted against abortion and gay rights and campaigned on a strict puritanical religious-right platform. Remember this?

In early July 2007, Vitter's phone number was included in a published list of phone records of Pamela Martin and Associates, a company owned and run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, also known as the "D.C. Madam", which is accused by the U.S. government of being a prostitution service. Hustler magazine identified the phone number and contacted Vitter's office to ask about his connection to Palfrey... Phone records show that Vitter's number was called by Palfrey's service five times, the first on October 12, 1999, and the last on February 27, 2001. Two calls were placed while House roll call votes were in progress.

So did the Corporate Media, the political establishment, and the Religious Right demand Vitter's resignation? Of course not.

So why are they all demanding Gov. Spitzer's resignation?

As for the legal implications,

On November 13, 2007, the attorney for Palfrey served Vitter with a subpoena to force him to testify at a November 28, 2007 hearing about whether an act of prostitution occurred with a Palfrey escort and when. The following week, the judge in the case canceled the hearing. Palfrey's attorney indicated he planned to subpoena Vitter to testify at her 2008 criminal trial.

We'll be carefully watching how the Corporate Media covers this case - and how the Justice Department prosecutes it. And if Spitzer gets harsher treatment than Vitter, we'll raise holy hell.

Update 1: Jane Hamsher asks all the right questions:

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer? Spitzer is a longtime client, a rich guy and the governor. We're talking thousands of dollars here, not millions. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they spotted a "suspicious transfer" made by the governor, and that this is how things began. It's possible it was just ordinary paperwork the bank had to file with the government whenever some particular flag was raised, but if that's the case, why did the DoJ go to DefCon 3?

2. What is a USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case? This isn't normally what the feds spend their time with.

3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony. Sources familiar with the investigation say that he sent a prosecution memo to DC two months ago asking for authority to indict a public figure (Spitzer). Which means they had their case made long before the wire tap of February 13. Why did they then include this line from that conversation in the complaint?

LEWIS continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe -- you know -- I mean that...very basic things...."Kristen" responded: "I have a way of dealing with that...I'd be like listen dude, you really want the sex?...You know what I mean."

This salacious detail does not seem like it's necessary to make their case, and appears to be added for no other purpose than to destroy Spitzer's career.

4. How did Spitzer's name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn't happen to Dave Vitter.

5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently? And why did he give $500,000 to Joe Bruno? He's good buddies with Mike Mukasey. What did he know and how did he know it?

6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?

7. Spitzer's been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while. Roger Stone, Roger Stone, Roger Stone.