ALBANY County District Attorney David Soares’ eyeball glazer of a re port on the Spitzer administration’s apparent effort to off a political enemy concludes that the former governor probably told a couple of untruths.
Not little white lies, mind you – but whoppers serious enough that a grand jury might have recommended that Spitzer be removed from office.
It makes you wonder: How grateful would Client 9 be today if that were the only mess on his plate?
Of course, there’s no reason to believe that Soares would actually have moved against Spitzer in any serious way had ol’ Eliot not so spectacularly done himself in.
As for the impact a Democratic governor might have – one way or the other – on the career of an ambitious young Democratic prosecutor . . . well, that goes without saying.
Nobody’s denying that the State Police was deeply involved in the Dirty Tricks Scandal – but nobody seems even remotely interested in the implications of that.
You’d never know it from Soares’ report, but it remains that state troopers were set to spying on state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.
The troopers, of course, were only following orders.
But whose orders?
Yes, Preston L. Felton was removed as superintendent of the State Police by Gov. Paterson, almost as his first official act.
But William Howard, who was Spitzer’s liaison to the State Police, remains in a sensitive state Homeland Security post despite his heavy involvement in the Dirty Tricks Scandal.
And Daniel Wiese, a retired high-ranking state trooper with political ties to both former Gov. George Pataki and Spitzer – he’s mentioned in the Soares report as providing information to a newspaper anonymously that the State Police had long had concerns about Bruno’s use of state aircraft – remains as inspector general of the state Power Authority.
If the Dirty Tricks Scandal were merely a matter of one politician’s tossing mud pies at another, it would indeed have been small beer. But it was about the official abuse of a powerful police agency that seems all too willing to be abused – and that ought to scare the daylights out of all New Yorkers.
mcmanus@nypost.com