And so it begins: the day's story is Client 9, in a full-throttle media feeding frenzy reminiscent of nothing so much as the Monica mess. Notably absent from mainstream media coverage is the question of political aspects of the investigation by the Bush Justice Department.

The New York Times:

Sadly, this was not the first time that Mr. Spitzer has been caught up in his own arrogance. For all his promise as governor, Mr. Spitzer’s first year was unnecessarily rocky and full of the kinds of mistakes that come as much from hubris as from being new on the job. After succeeding with a few reforms, the governor’s ill-fated attempts to smear his Republican opponent lost him months of progress. Only recently had he seemed to be tempering his abrasive style.

Mr. Spitzer did not seem to understand on Monday what he owed the public — a strong argument for why he should be trusted again. The longer he hesitates, it becomes a harder case to make.

Also in the New York Times, a broad overview of the battlelines; Democrats are shocked, republicans gleeful.

The news was met with disbelief and shock in Albany, a capital accustomed to scandal. Some legislative assistants said they were too stunned to speak, and lawmakers gathered around television sets in hushed offices, trying to make sense of what had happened.

“We’re at a total standstill,” said Keith L. T. Wright, a Democratic assemblyman from Harlem. “Everybody is stunned. Everybody is absolutely stunned.” [...]

Mr. Spitzer called Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, on Monday afternoon after his statement, but his aides did not share details of the conversation. Mr. Paterson was said to be keeping a low profile, awaiting the governor’s decision.

About 6 p.m., Richard Baum, the governor’s top aide, met with Mr. Spitzer’s staff but made no mention of a resignation and urged his colleagues to keep their heads down and continue as best they could with the day-to-day work of state government.[...]

Republicans were quick to pounce, with the state party and a top lawmaker calling for him to resign.

“The governor who was going to bring ethics back to New York State, if he was involved in something like this,” said James N. Tedisco, the Republican minority leader of the Assembly, “he’s got to leave. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

None of the state's top Democrats - Senators Schumer and Clinton, Speaker Silver, Minority Leader Smith, the Members of the House - have come out with any support of a politically isolated governor. This is what happens to reformers pledged to making themselves unpopular by attacking the status quo; they wind up with fewer friends than they'd have if they left bad enough alone.

Meanwhile, questions are flying across the blogosphere, questions about the political role of the Justice Department. A diarist on Daily Kos, here, points out that the Spitzer investigation was approved by Attorney General Mukasey, that leaking Spitzer's name is highly unusual (and improper), and that the reported genesis of the investigation, large movements of cash from the governor's account, would not normally rise to the level of being investigated. Another Kossack, here, fleshes out Jane Hamscher's piece we reported on yesterday.

At Open Left, Matt Stoller wonders whether the Bush administration is going after Eliot Spitzer.

Consider the obvious parallels with the Joe Bruno case. Bruno announced on December 19th, 2006, that subpoenas had been issued in an FBI investigation of his consulting firm - in the Spring of that year. That investigation remained airtight for months and through a general election. The Emperor's Club case broke on Thursday of last week; the next day, the New York Times began investigating.

It gets even odder when you consider the timing. Someone inside the Department of Justice or the U.S. Attorney's office must have tipped off the Times either on Thursday or Friday, which - with due diligence on the paper's part - meant that the story would break at the start of a new weekly media cycle, and not in the dead-end news dump time of Friday night, when DoJ (along with the rest of the Bush administration)usually announces things it prefers not receive wide coverage.

Then there's the unusual involvement of the U.S. Attorney's office. More precisely, what's unusual here is that, despite the ongoing story of the political degradation of those offices, nobody in the mainstream media seems to be looking at the political intent, if any, of this investigation. A remarkable exception is Scott Horton at Harper's, who provides a lengthy list of unanswered - and largely unasked - questions.

However, there is a second tier of questions that needs to be examined with respect to the Spitzer case. They go to prosecutorial motivation and direction. Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican. Beyond this, a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles. Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats. So here are the rather amazing facts that surface in the Spitzer case:

(1) The prosecutors handling the case came from the Public Integrity Section.

(2) The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive. [...]

(3) The resources dedicated to the case in terms of prosecutors and investigators are extraordinary.

(4) How the investigation got started. 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.

All of these facts are consistent with a process which is not the investigation of a crime, but rather an attempt to target and build a case against an individual.

Is Spitzer the target of a politically motivated investigation? It's entirely possible. Certainly, it's difficult to imagine a worse scenario for New York Democrats, poised to take over control of both chambers of the legislature while holding every statewide office, than a meltdown of the state's top Democrat. If cui bono is a legitimate question to ask of this case, clearly, a political benefit accrues to the same party that also controls the levers of the investigation - and that would be the republicans.