Spitzer's Epic AIG Battle

Spitzer v. AIG!  How would one even begin to tell the tale of history's ballsiest Attorney General attempting to take on what was then the most powerful corporation on earth? Here are some brief thoughts from Spitzer himself, which he shared in January, 2010 at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.  

"I have sort of a unique relationship with AIG…. I started off tilting at windmills when we brought our civil case alleging all sorts of accounting fraud at AIG. And it was met with hue and cry from the financial world: 'How can you say anything bad about AIG? It’s the best company in the world.'

"And I said, 'You have to understand, this is the center of the web.'  And I would go home at the end of the day and say to my wife, 'I feel like I’m stuck in this web and this giant black widow is about to kill me but I’m telling you there’s something wrong with this company.'" 

(Editor's Note: If that image isn't the cover of a Spitzer comic, I don't know what would be. It's half Spiderman, half Mel Brooks in "High Anxiety":)

"And AIG was the vortex, it really was. The reason I’ve called for the release of all the AIG emails is twofold, one I do believe if we follow those emails – and I said release them to the public, let everybody bring their investigative skills, thousands of journalists, lawyers, whomever, to parse them and find out what was going on, the reason we need to do that is because is was the center."

(Editor's Note: The vortex! Let's try that again. Here's Mel Brooks hovering over a spirally-looking thingamabob that possibly could be a vortex in the brilliant film, "High Anxiety":)

"The reason we CAN do it - this isn’t IBM which is really a private company - is we own AIG. We have made a $180 billion investment in AIG. As the shareholders, we can say, we want to know. So we are in a position to tell the three trustees appointed by the Treasury Department, to tell the Board of Directors, release the email, redact all the private stuff, take away all the legal privilege stuff, but let us understand the financial transactions between AIG and Goldman, AIG and all their counterparties. The counterparty payments at 100 cents on the dollar, this was the greatest scam in history, absolutely outrageous. It swamped in importance the bonus issue. The counterparty payment was fundamentally wrong. 

"And this is when I really, finally lost it with Geithner. We give all this money through AIG to the counterparties, and we take stock in the worthless shell, rather than even taking stock in the recipient of the money. This is Dealmaking 101. So I said, 'These guys don’t get it. This is something that we should really dig into, it’s beginning to happen a year later, but so be it.'"