I am not talking about the thousands of dollars he paid or the money to transfer said prostitute across state lines.
I am talking about a promising career to which, even if he doesn't resign, is no longer so promising.
I am talking about publicly embarrassing his family and his wife, Silda, with his indiscretions.
Party wise, this is the height an election season to which Democratic contender, although not a part of the story itself, is being affected...evidenced by Hillary Clinton scrubbing all mention of her high profile Spitzer endorsement off of her site within an hour of the story breaking.
An awful high price to pay for a call girl, don't you think?
We touched on the original announcement yesterday, but today, more news continues to flow about Elliot Spitzer and what led to the scandal of this campaign season, even though it isn't even a scandal involving any presidential candidates.
The news about how this investigation progressed came out yesterday when ABC headlined their piece, "It Wasn't the Sex; Suspicious $$ Transfers Led to Spitzer".
In that article it said:
The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.
It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperor's Club.
Today we see more reports showing exactly how those initial investigations progressed.
A routine tax inquiry:
A criminal investigation began last year into suspicious financial transactions, conducted by Elliot Spitzer, were reported to the internal revenue service when banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York.
According to officials speaking anonymously, it wasn't even the transactions themselves that flagged Spitzer, it was his efforts to "conceal the source, destination or purpose of the movement", of those transactions.
The money ended up in the bank accounts of what appeared to be shell companies, corporations that essentially had no real business.
The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators.
This brought together different agencies to investigate, the I.R.S.'s Criminal Investigation Division, the FBI and federal prosecutors from Manhattan.
It didn't take long for these investigators to realize, they were not looking at a man trying to conceal bribes, but a man attempting to conceal that he was meeting, arranging travel for and paying for prostitutes.
This led investigators to the Emperor’s Club V.I.P, a very high priced escort service that used shell companies, which are corporations that essentially had no real business,to run their money through.
Many Spitzer supporters are saying he should not resign, but loyal party members seem to disagree, because the story that broke yesterday is about to get worse for Elliott Spitzer. Some reports say that there is more than 5,000 intercepted phone calls and text messages and more than 6,000 e-mails recovered with search warrants as well as bank records, travel and hotel records and physical surveillance.
Spitzer is putting together a very impressive legal team which will fight this battle for him, but the evidence of the investigation, listed above, will end up in the public eye and for the Democratic party, his resignation is the only way that will help blunt further damage to the Democratic party as a whole.
Disassociation is the name of the game at this point and many, just as Clinton did, want to distance themselves from Spitzer as quickly as possible.
On a side note, there are GOP lawmakers indicating that they will seek to impeach Spitzer if he does not resign within 48 hours.
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