What a brilliant job Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker magazine did in the article on the sex life of New York's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, which yesterday led to his resignation, for which these two deserve the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative journalism!
Eric Schneiderman was the AG who completely ignored the Moveon.org petition I wrote, formally asking him as Attorney General to go into Federal Court to request a judicial order to redo the fatally flawed 2016 NY primary, after one third of a million voters were purged and unable to vote in that primary. Just in Brooklyn and the Bronx alone there were 128,000 voters who were disenfranchised, mostly Hispanic and African American voters. (In the consolidated NY statutes, this would be akin to asking the NM Supreme Court for a Writ of Mandamus).
7200 people signed the petition, including 4000+ New Yorkers; I compiled their incisive comments into 3 articles at OpEdNews; I then sent the NY A.G. these articles along with the petition.
This is proof that in Albany we are seeing Tammany Hall or worse all over again, except now with cell phones and iPads, and without Boss Tweed and the 1860's handlebar mustaches. Albany's corruption is obvious and on-going. We should be glad in most of the United States to not have such deranged individuals "serving" at the highest levels of law enforcement or in the Executive Branch, to the extent we read about in the New Yorker article.
Schneiderman was part of the Clinton Dream Team of her top 100 highly placed advisers. The big picture was that that highly flawed primary and the purging of voters was all to be swept under the rug as much as could be. All 7 of New York's million reader newspapers largely ignored this issue, except for Shaun King at the New York Daily News.
As a glaring example, the News Editor of the Associated Press Manhattan office, David Caruso, personally told me that the AP had never even interviewed the two officials at the Bureau of Elections who did the purging, not even to establish whether they were acting on behalf of someone in particular, or were they coerced or bribed to do what they did.
I recall clearly how Clinton's ensuing "victory" in the New York primary was then used to ratchet up her campaigning in the rest of the states; the newspapers in New York posited from then on that it was all over and "in the bag" for Hillary as if the entire world of Journalism and Politics revolved around New York City.
It was Bernie Sanders who suffered the most from this debacle as it progressed.
Realizing the staggering dysfunction in the Albany Attorney General's Executive Office and how this spilled endemically over into the top levels of New York, I shifted the inquiry from Schneiderman's office to that of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, who was later to be fired by Donald Trump. That too came to nothing.
When you comprehend this level of the collapse of these processes, you arrive at a sobering and depressing perception of how miserably we run our elections in the United States, as bad as some 3rd world nations. Please take 80 minutes and watch on YouTube this film: UNCOUNTED: THE NEW MATH OF THE AMERICAN ELECTIONS. Computer manipulation of election results is a serious unattended problem, if we are indeed going to naively continue consider our nation to be a democracy.
When purging voters goes unpunished and uninvestigated by officials, journalists and editors, vote rigging comes next, and that will also be routinely and categorically ignored.
If top officials in a state abandon responsibilities because they are like Schneiderman with his deviant alcoholic sexual practices, we as a nation are in more serious trouble than we usually realize.
A reader in NYC has pointed out that many months later, Schneiderman did "investigate" the purges, did make statements when it was safe to do so, all of which came far too late. My purpose in writing this was to clarify that he did nothing AT THE TIME IT WAS OCCURRING, when it still could be remedied, not glossed over with band-aids ex post facto.
The Governor's office, the AG's office, and the NYC Comptroller all did routine "CYA" investigations, but none of those fixed the problem or even, I believe, would prevent the purging from occurring again.
Please see also his press release about intervening in a relevant lawsuit:
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