Opinion

Transparency needed for NY’s pols

Eliot Spitzer has just won a small victory in the ongoing legal saga over his private e-mails. We just hope it doesn’t ultimately translate into a big defeat for the idea of public accountability.

At issue are Spitzer’s private e-mails. Howard Smith, a former American Insurance Group executive, is seeking them as part of his defense in an ongoing civil fraud suit started in 2005 by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Smith maintains that the e-mails will show that Spitzer launched his case more out of a personal vendetta than because AIG was doing anything wrong.

Spitzer, for his part, says such e-mails do not exist. Now an appeals court judge has just ruled that before Spitzer can be forced to turn over any of them, he deserves the chance to be heard as part of the proceedings. That overturns a lower-court ruling in which Albany Supreme Court Justice Christopher Cahill ordered the current attorney general to get any Spitzer e-mails relevant to the Smith case.

The latest ruling means the litigation will go on for some time yet. But we note two things about the original order from Judge Cahill that bear repeating. One is a matter of fact; the other a matter of principle.

The matter of fact was Judge Cahill’s statement that “there appears to be no dispute” that Spitzer “used a private e-mail account to conduct official business.” The allusion appears to be to the 2007 Troopergate scandal in which associates of then-Gov. Spitzer used private accounts paid for by the Spitzer campaign to gather dirt on GOP state Senate leader Joe Bruno.

The principle at stake is this: If public officials can escape accountability simply by using their private e-mails to do their dirty work, the public’s right to know will have little meaning.

Just as Judge Cahill says, the issue for disclosure is not whether a document is a public or private e-mail but “the content and purpose of the document.”

That’s still at issue. And surely the last thing New York’s politicians need is yet another avenue for avoiding transparency.