In an interview yesterday with Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray, New York AG (“Attorney General” or “Aspiring Governor,” take your pick) Eliot Spitzer observed that he agreed with the recent Supreme Court decision in Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States and that a criminal indictment of a company often is the wrong way to proceed in an investigation because of the risk of destroying the company. Comparing his investigations to those of the heavy-handed Enron Task Force, Mr. Spitzer made the following comment:

“I’ve always said Andersen was an improper indictment, because it wasn’t proportionate. We use a scalpel, not a meat ax.”

If what Mr. Spitzer is using on American International Group Inc. is a scalpel, then he must own one helluva meat ax.
Meanwhile, this NY Times article reports that Mr. Spitzer’s immunity deal with former AIG executive Joseph Umansky was not coordinated with other ongoing investigations into AIG and effectively removed Mr. Umansky as a realistic target of those investigations.