After Spitzer Talks
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Less than a year after the election that installed in Albany a governor who was supposed to change things on day one, Eliot Spitzer was being interviewed by a criminal prosecutor in respect of the troopergate scandal. It was, our Jacob Gershman reports on page four, the first time that investigators formally questioned the governor, who has repeatedly insisted that he was unaware that his aides had done anything improper. Indeed, he has denied all knowledge of the scheme the prosecutor is investigating. It is unclear whether the governor was under oath in his encounter with the prosecutor, David Soares. Our sense of the situation is that Governor Cuomo, one of his predecessors, and Senator Bruno are right. It’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to make the doubts of New Yorkers go away absent sworn testimony.
Not that giving false information to investigators without being under oath is something that’s permitted. Ask Martha Stewart. Mr. Spitzer’s interview, in any event, comes at what Mr. Gershman believes is the end of Mr. Soares’s seven-week-long criminal inquiry. The district attorney’s public integrity unit has interviewed several other high-level aides to the governor and was expected to make public its conclusions by the end of the week. The DA’s report is certain to face scrutiny from Senate Republicans, who are loaded for bear, as well they should be. Yesterday the Senate Republicans announced that they had hired a former United States attorney, Joseph diGenova, to serve as a special counsel for their own probe of the matter.
In our opinion, Mr. diGenova has a mixed record; the United States prosecution he headed was sharply criticized by an appeals judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District to Columbia Circuit for its handling of the case of Jonathan Pollard, even as the court denied Pollard’s plea for a new sentence. But, as Mr. Gershman notes in his dispatch, the Republican conference has accused the administration of not cooperating with investigators. Even if Mr. Soares does not find that a crime took place, Mr. Gershman reports, he could determine whether Mr. Spitzer or his aides provided conflicting answers about their knowledge of the controversy. The senate is more than entitled to press this matter as far as it can.
At the same time, the state ethics commission is looking into whether the governor’s office violated state ethics laws, combing through thousands of e-mails turned over by the Spitzer administration and subpoenaing Mr. Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp. In July, Attorney General Cuomo’s office released a report alleging that Mr. Dopp, and the liaison to police, William Howard, directed the state police to gather information about Mr. Bruno’s use of security escorts and planted the records in the press in the hopes of generating negative coverage on the senator. The governor endorsed Mr. Cuomo’s report and apologized for his administration’s actions, convincing no one.
The big vacuum that we sense at the moment is not in all these investigations, though New Yorkers don’t have all the answers they’re going to need to return confidence to Mr. Spitzer’s badly damaged administration. The big vacuum we sense is on the Republican side. It’s one thing to spend all this energy tearing down a Democratic governor who brought his own troubles on himself. But what is the point if the Republicans are not going to also mount an effort to build up their own party as a party of principle and reform. This is the question that needs to be pressed — and, though the drama over Mr. Spitzer is intense in the short term, the reform of the Republicans themselves is what will matter more in the medium term.