New York Democrats call for an end to administration probes

SEPARATED AT BIRTH? - New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, left, and President George W. Bush face ongoing probes by legislative leaders; but while Democrats are pleading for an end to politics in the Empire State, it's business as usual in Washington, DC.

U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney accused those of pointing fingers as “trying to score political points at the expense of the people's business,” while her colleague, U.S. Representative Jerry Nadler, called a Senate investigation “redundant,” and “an enormous distraction from the possibility of continuing the progress that has so far defined this legislative session.”

With House and Senate Democrats holding more than 600 oversight hearings into the Bush Administration since assuming control of Congress in January, one might assume the two veteran lawmakers were urging an end to the relentless partisan attacks on President George W. Bush.

They weren’t.

In fact, Nadler and Maloney this week came to the defense of New York’s beleaguered Democrat Governor, Eliot Spitzer, who is embroiled in a still-unfolding scandal centered on his administration’s use of the New York State Police in a failed attempt to destroy the career of a political rival.

Maloney was the first member of Congress to come to Spitzer’s defense since an explosive report by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo found that top aides to the Governor “conspired with the State Police to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno by cooking up a plot claiming he misused state aircraft.” Bruno, a Republican, was cleared by Cuomo, and the Attorney General instead focused his investigation on the actions of the Spitzer administration.

One Spitzer aide was demoted, and another suspended without pay. Two of Spitzer’s closest confidantes, chief of staff Richard Baum and Communications Director Darren Dopp have since hired lawyers.

According to Cuomo’s report, the involvement of New York’s police force in the scheme “appears to have been unprecedented in State Police history.”

That Nadler and Maloney were the first Democrats to come to Spitzer’s defense is rife with irony. Maloney, once dubbed a “lightweight…devoting herself to symbolic causes that have little chance of passage,” opined that “four investigations equal a four-ring political circus.” But the Manhattan Democrat is a sponsor of exactly four different House resolutions targeting the Bush Administration, including three separate bills to censure the President.

Since the New York State Senate empanelled a committee to delve into “Troopergate,” as it’s come to be known, a top lawyer in the Spitzer administration refused to testify, sending an aide in her place.

Spitzer’s Inspector General, Kristine Hamann, is charged with rooting out corruption in state government. According to an article in the New York Post, she “abruptly refused to participate…in the Senate Investigations Committee probe of the Troopergate scandal, leading furious Republicans to charge the governor's aides with ‘a pattern’ of stonewalling.”

As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Nadler helped passed a party-line contempt citation against White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former counsel Harriet Miers, after the two officials declined to appear before a hearing investigating the dismissal of a handful of U.S. Attorneys.

An indignant Nadler fumed “the duty of this committee is not only to protect Americans against crime and other things. It is also to protect constitutional liberty, in this case against an administration that is clearly intent on subverting liberty and assuming almost monarchical powers.”

Nadler seems less concerned about Spitzer’s use of the State Police to subvert the liberties of Bruno, penning an absurd OpEd in the New York Sun comparing Troopergate to the Whitewater scandal that plagued the early years of President Bill Clinton.

Whitewater involved questionable business dealings by the Clintons with developers James and Susan McDougal. While fourteen people were convicted of various crimes, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker was forced to resign from office, no one was accused of misusing government resources to carry out a political vendetta, as they have been in Troopergate.

Spitzer critics have similarly drawn parallels to Watergate, where aides to then-President Richard Nixon carried out a plot to discredit Nixon rivals.

While Watergate may be a closer comparison, one need not go back more than 30 years to find a parallel between the Albany and Washington controversies. Beyond the refusal of administration officials to appear before legislative panels in both the state and national capitals, Troopergate seems a hybrid of more recent investigations: the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the continuing probe over the U.S. Attorney dismissals.

“In the Valerie Plame affair, senior White House officials were accused of leaking information to a reporter to harm a political rival. Ditto on Troopergate.

“In the ongoing controversy over the firings of several politically-appointed U.S. attorney’s, House and Senate Democrats bristled after learning that several administration officials communicated via non-government e-mails, and that those e-mails may not be available to investigators. In Troopergate, the New York Post reported ‘the governor's office had failed to turn over to Cuomo's office e-mails from the personal addresses used by Spitzer's aides’.”

In all three cases, various administration officials have refused to cooperate with investigations by the legislature.

But as the probes, hearings and investigations continue in Washington, neither Nadler nor Maloney have called on fellow Democrats to “get back to work.”