Scott Horton, in his latest bit of hackery on the Spitzer scandal, doubles down on his unsupported claim that Spitzer was the target of a political witch hunt by the Bush administration.  Amusingly, in attacking a New York Times op-ed by John Farmer, Horton writes:

Even in defending them, Farmer acknowledges, as he must, that the conduct of the investigation failed to meet minimal professional standards. He agrees that the prosecutors filled public filings with salacious details and developed a suspicious and unprofessional rapport with the press (which the press, including the Times, perhaps unsurprisingly is unwilling to note or criticize). He correctly observes that this “is simply inexcusable.”

Of course, on March 10, Horton was making essentially the opposite complaint:

The Justice Department has yet to give a full account of why they were looking into Spitzer’s payments, and indeed the suggestion in the ABC account is that it didn’t have anything to do with a prostitution ring. The suggestion that this was driven by an IRS inquiry and involved a bank might heighten, rather than allay, concerns of a politically motivated prosecution.

Horton’s complaint was inaccurate at the time, as the very story he quoted on March 10 contained plenty of detail as to how the investigation got launched.  But now Horton wants to take offense at the fact that people are putting out the facts of the case… to head off conspiracy theorists like Horton.

Horton continues:

In this case, the facts are not fully developed, but we learn a little more every day. Today’s Times tells us that the North Fork Bank launched the inquiry by submitting a Suspicious Activity Report against their client, Governor Spitzer, on the basis that he had made a number of smaller payments in order to avoid a $10,000 threshold for reporting. The Times quotes Bob Serino, a former counsel at the Treasury Department, as saying that “Banks could certainly decide that a politician’s risk rate is higher and thus have a higher level of due diligence set for someone like Spitzer.” This is true, and it points to an Orwellian deterioration of relations between banks and their customers which undermines a basic service relationship. Instead of serving their clients, banks are increasingly asked to spy on their clients for the benefit of a pervasive national surveillance state. The prospect that this will be used for abusive purposes, especially with elected officials and other public purposes, is strong, and in fact well demonstrated by the Spitzer case. Indeed, the suspicion that the bank apparently articulated, that Spitzer was laundering bribes, is and was absurd. But that baseless “suspicion” was enough to launch a massive fishing expedition into the governor’s finances and is now very aggressively invoked by prosecutors as cover for what increasingly looks like a political hit job.

 In reality, the article Horton links begins with this lede:

Last July, the North Fork Bank raised a red flag about suspicious financial transactions involving Gov. Eliot Spitzer. But for several months, the electronic report languished unnoticed in a vast Treasury Department database in Detroit.  (Emphasis added.)

The article makes clear that the investigation actually arose from a report filed by the HSBC bank about suspicious transactions connected to the two shell companies connected to the prostitution ring.  The SBC bank raised a big alarm because it had apparently failed to adequately vet the company:

Following the bank’s alert, agents for the Internal Revenue Service in Hauppauge, on Long Island, began examining the shell companies, which are allegedly connected to a Web-based prostitution service named Emperor’s Club V.I.P. At that time, the agents had no idea how the QAT front companies had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

“They still didn’t know what the business was, and they started digging into the account — is it drugs, money laundering?” said one of the people briefed on the inquiry. “They then start to see money from Spitzer.”

So — contra Horton — the investigation was initially launched with no thought of Spitzer or bribery.  Indeed, Horton has just had to admit that banks do give greater scrutiny to politically exposed persons like Spitzer, yet the initial report from the North Fork Bank failed to trigger the evil machinations of BushCo and their vindicitve minions on Wall Street.

That is why Horton abruptly switches from his prior, baseless, ad hominem innuendo about the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to his complaint about the “national surveillance state.”  Horton is already on the record complaining about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, at which time he was not concerned that he learned about it through the illegal leaking of top secret classified information to the New York Times.  No, in that case, there was no “suspicious and unprofessional” relationship between the paper and its law enforcement sources.

On the merits, Horton’s claim here amounts to an objection to our nation’s money laundering laws, though he works hard not to make that point directly for obvious reasons.

When avoidance fails, Horton resorts to mendacity:

But even beyond this opening phase, the conduct of the case, to the limited extent it has surfaced in public filings and newspaper accounts, points to very questionable calls on the part of politically appointed law-enforcement officials. They decided to devote massive resources to the matter which could not be justified on the basis of the small payments in question. Did they invest these resources not because they had detected a crime—there was none—but because they had a prominent Democratic officeholder in their sites and they wanted to find something compromising about him?

Since Horton asked, the answer is that Horton has nothing to back up his claim that no crime was committed.  Before one gets to the possible Mann Act violation — as I have noted earlier — “structuring” is itself a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison. 

Horton then proceeds to charge the feds with hypocrisy:

Here again, the Bush Justice Department has one set of standards when Republican officials fall into a prostitution ring, and an entirely different set when the target is a Democrat who is threatening the Republican Party’s power base in Albany. We just need to look over the “D.C. Madam” case, which caught in its snare a high-level official of the Bush Administration and a Republican senator. But the Bush Justice Department’s attitude towards that case couldn’t be more different. It is deferential towards the customers and has shown no interest in bringing charges against any of them.

Again, reality intrudes:

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., isn’t likely to face any criminal liability over allegations by the operator of a former Canal Street brothel that he was a customer, or his own apology for his connection to an alleged Washington, D.C., prostitution ring.

The statute of limitations for bringing solicitation of prostitution charges, a misdemeanor in both Louisiana and Washington, suggests that the opportunity to bring charges has passed. In Louisiana, solicitation charges must be brought within two years of the alleged act, while in Washington, the limit is three years.

Thus, the DoJ could not prosecute Vitter for what were misdemeanors.  The same is likely true for former Bush official Randall Tobias.   Spitzer’s alleged felonies, however, are brand spanking new.

Finally, as Horton complains that the New York Times failed to identify the author of the op-ed as a republican politician, I again find it necessary to note that Horton and Harper’s both failed to disclose Horton’s major conflict of interest in his reporting on the Bilal Hussein case.

(h/t daleyrocks.)

Update:  Given Horton’s great concern over surveillance and politically-motivated investigations, we can anxiously await Horton’s take on this story (via Reuters):

Lawyers for Spitzer, a Democrat, and the Republican-led state Senate committee appeared at a hearing on Thursday over accusations that Spitzer’s administration used the state police to spy on the Senate’s top Republican, Joseph Bruno, for political purposes.

Spitzer’s lawyer called it the inquiry “a fishing expedition.”  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  But certainly Horton would have questions that must be investigated.

(h/t Dan Collins.)