New York Daily News – Attorney General Eliot Spitzer may be known as the “sheriff of Wall Street,” but there’s at least one group of high rollers – hedge fund managers – thathe’s happy to ride sidesaddle with, records show.
The Democrat’s campaign for governor has collected nearly $1 million from hedge fund honchos in the past year, according to a Daily News review, drawing complaints from GOP foes that he is taking money from a rarefied Wall Street subset over which he has regulatory oversight.
“An attorney has an ethical duty to avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” said Andrea Tantaros, a spokeswoman for Bill Weld, one of Spitzer’s Republican rivals. “Revelations that Mr. Spitzer is raising money from firms that he is arguably regulating seems to raise serious issues about his ethics.”
Republicans, however, could point to no specific wrongdoing in hedge funds that they said Spitzer should be pursuing, and Spitzer’s campaign insisted that he remained committed to rooting out wrongdoing – wherever he finds it.
“We welcome support from those who recognize that Eliot Spitzer helped make the financial markets healthier for all by cracking down on those who abused it,” said Spitzer campaign spokeswoman Christine Anderson.
But the contributions do offer an interesting counterpoint to the perception that the Democrat is widely reviled on Wall Street for his aggressive pursuit of shady investment bankers and overcompensated CEOs.
