A hunter becomes the hunted

A hunter becomes the hunted

Eliot Spitzer said Wednesday that after he repairs the damage done to his family by his assignations with high-priced hookers he will “try once again, outside of politics, to serve the common good.”

That’s all well and good, but Spitzer also faces the not insignificant matter of criminal charges — and these aren’t the kind of low-grade soliciting charges that are easily dispatched in a municipal court with a no-contest plea and a fine.

Spitzer didn’t just show bad moral judgment, he showed incredibly bad legal judgement by transferring funds and arranging for the travel of a prostitute from New York to a Washington, D.C., hotel. That makes his crime, quite literally, a federal case.

Can’t claim ignorance

One of the remarkable things about Spitzer’s undoing was that before he was elected New York governor in 2006, Spitzer had been a federal prosecutor and the New York state attorney general. As columnist Susan Estrich wrote, it’s almost as if Spitzer had been absent from her class at Harvard Law School the day she discussed the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate prostitution.

Books have been written, and more doubtless will be written, on why powerful men — mayors, congressmen, senators, governors and presidents — engage in risky sexual behaviors that jeopardize family relationships, careers and their place in history. Overnight, Spitzer rewrote what will be the eventual lead paragraph of his obituary. It’s easy enough to generalize and speculate about why Spitzer spent as much as $80,000 on prostitutes provided by the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., but only Spitzer’s therapist will know anything close to the real story. And she or he won’t be talking.

Spitzer acted with relative speed under trying circumstances after the scandal broke over the weekend. Monday he issued the requisite public apology; by Tuesday night he rejected the advice of his wife and his closest adviser to try to ride out the storm, and by midday Wednesday he announced that he was resigning.

No deals

The U.S. attorney’s office in New York released a statement saying that Spitzer’s resignation was made without any plea agreement on the criminal charges. That’s good.

Spitzer deserves whatever public sympathy he may receive from those who recognize the tragic nature of his own destruction of a potentially sterling political career. But he deserves no more of a break from the legal system than he was willing to give when he was a prosecutor — or when he was supporting a tough new New York law that held johns as culpable as prostitutes when sex was traded for money.

His were not casual transactions, as shown by the amounts of money involved and the methods used to transfer those funds.

If Spitzer and his lawyers agree to plea rather than go through the embarrassment of a trial, the plea should be guilty as charged, and the penalties should be tempered not with mercy, but with justice. The same justice he sought when he was on the other side of the law.