Governor Eliot Spitzer came in for a bit of a drubbing on this page last week. After reviewing a history of the misconduct of his team when he was New York’s Attorney General—a pattern that seems largely unchanged now that he has been elevated by the citizens of our state to the governor’s mansion—we nicknamed him “Loathsome Eliot”—a tag we hope will stick.
But we did note—if not quite in defense of Spitzer then at least in mitigation—that the problem might not lie solely within, well, the soul of Spitzer. It may, indeed, sit at the very foundation of the modern office of Attorney General, which has lately become the font of many of the worst lawsuits launched against businessmen and Wall Street executives. This morning’s Wall Street Journal carried an editorial—at the World they call these things ‘randos,’ which is short for ‘reviews and observations’—drawing our attention back to the Attorney Generals.
It should hardly be news to anyone reading DealBreaker that Spitzer’s successes have spawned a generation of vipers—Mini-Me AGs who hope to follow Spitzer into their state’s executive suite by garnering notoriety for themselves by aggressively prosecuting highly publicized chases against long-standing business practices. At the heart of the problem with our Attorney Generals is a lack of any code of conduct or guidelines, according to the study out of the Institute for Legal Reform cited by the editorial board of the Journal. In this they are unlike district attorneys or federal prosecutors, who are—at least theoretically—constrained by official standards governing things like notice periods on criminal charges, public comments alleging misdeeds and investigating techniques. The AGs have been set loose upon the world without any manner or manual of restraint—save periodic election—and they are behaving, unsurprisingly, like Grendel in the great hall.
The editorialists at the Journal are perennial optimists, and they optimistically endorse the Institute’s call for a national code of conduct. But, while we continue to resist the label of ‘doomsayer,’ we cannot share their sunny outlook. The monster AGs are already on the prowl, and we’re not sure a manual or a code will be enough to keep them at bay.
AGs Gone Wild [Wall Street Journal]

Chief among the names being thrown around as the next Attorney General is Michael Chertoff. And when we say the name Chertoff is being thrown around, we mean that Chertoff’s associates seem to be engaged in shock and awe carpet-bombing of the media and White House to get the job for their man.
Sometimes referred to as “The First Attorney of New Jersey” (a title which, we’re assured, is meant as a compliment), the current Secretary of Homeland Security has spent most of his career as a government lawyer. After graduating Harvard law school (where he served on the prestigious law review), he began his career as a law clerk for Justice Brennan, became an assistant US Attorney and was appointed by the first President Bush to serve as US attorney in New Jersey.
At thirty-six, he was one of the youngest ever to get such an appointment. “ Kid Prosecutor,” a partner at a prominent corporate law firm once called him. He served as the Senate Republican majority’s chief counsel during the Whitewater hearings. He became the head of the Justice Department’s criminal prosecution arm and then was appointed by to the Third Circuit as a federal appeals judge by the current President Bush. Between government stints, however, he worked a partner at Latham & Watkins, where he won a number of high-profile cases for the defense. This guy’s resume has over-achiever written all over it. If you line up the letters according to your decoder ring it spells “Supreme Court Justice.”
But when the Bush administration considered appointing Chertoff to run the SEC, Wall Street acted quickly to shoot him down. Lobbyists with Wall Street firms stressed that his record as a successful and aggressive prosecutor gave him little experience in dealing with business issues, and behind closed doors they whispered that he might have developed a one-sided view of corporate America and Wall Street as being rife with criminality and fraud. Eventually the Bush administration settled on Chris Cox, a former Congressman and Latham & Watkins partner who was viewed as more sympathetic to Wall Street.
Some on Wall Street believe that the same criticisms might be applicable if Chertoff were appointed Attorney General. His controversial decision to prosecute Arthur Anderson for its role in Enron’s destruction strikes many as a bad sign.
“The best we can hope for is that he’ll concentrate on terror issues,” one Wall Street lawyer said. “He’s a born prosecutor and no friend of Wall Street or business in general.”