Isn’t this great…. Here we have a state agency and their job is to help keep the public integrity of our elected representatives in check. And what are they doing? Feeding information to the governor about the investigation into him… What does this tell us about the integrity of any of these state agencies. Well all we have to do is look at how they get appointed, who appoints them and where they come from.

State Agency Said To Interfere With Spitzer Probe

Albany County’s district attorney, David Soares, is alleging that the New York Commission on Public Integrity interfered with his investigation of the Spitzer administration by improperly coordinating with senior officials in the governor’s office, according to a source close to Mr. Soares.

Mr. Soares is expected to release a report of his findings as early as Friday. It is unclear, however, if his allegations against the ethics commission will be contained in his report. The district attorney has privately expressed concerns about the scope of communication between the commission and the administration of the former governor and may soon air them publicly.

The district attorney and the ethics panel, which is supposed to administer and enforce ethics and lobbying laws in New York government, have been conducting separate probes into whether Spitzer administration officials acted improperly when they assembled and released police records of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno’s use of state aircraft for fund-raising trips to New York City from Albany.

Mr. Soares has complained that the executive director of the commission, Herbert Teitelbaum, a former senior litigation partner of Bryan Cave LLP, passed on sensitive information to Spitzer officials concerning testimony from witnesses who had been interviewed by Mr. Soares’s office and may have prepped Spitzer aides before they were interviewed by Albany investigators, according to a source.

The district attorney has also told people close to his investigation that he suspects that Spitzer aides sought to pin responsibility for the controversy on Governor Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp, who left the administration last year after he was suspended for several weeks without pay.