WHAT is it with Eliot Spitzer? Can’t he pass his own petard without trying to hoist himself? First he got caught with a hooker in his hotel room. Now the disgraced former New York governor and attorney-general may be in trouble with e-mail, the tool he once used to beat up Wall Street.

According to the New York Post, Spitzer had a private e-mail account that he operated “surreptitiously” from his office (imagine).

This address appears to have landed Spitzer in trouble once before: e-mails from the account reportedly formed the basis of media reports about the Troopergate scandal, in which state troopers were used to dig up dirt on one of his political foes.

But the latest development concerns one of his enemies on Wall Street: Hank Greenberg, the insurance mogul whose career at AIG was derailed by Spitzer.

There is no love lost between the two. AIG was Greenberg’s creation and the company’s subsequent problems seem to have only burnished his ire.

His legal team has been seeking the release of e-mails Spitzer used in his 2005 prosecution of Greenberg for alleged fraud at AIG.

After years of skirmishes, most of the charges against Greenberg have been thrown out of court. But in their fightback, Greenberg’s lawyers are hoping to uncover embarrassing messages from Spitzer’s private account.

They claim the e-mails detail his contacts with AIG insiders and his attempts to persuade journalists to write flattering stories about his political future.

If anyone knows exactly how embarrassing e-mails can be, it’s Spitzer. They were the source of many of his finest moments during his Wall Street-bashing heyday.

In one famous missive leaked to the Wall Street Journal, the analyst Jack Grubman boasted that Sandy Weill, then the boss of Citi, was paying off an exclusive Manhattan school where Grubman was having trouble placing his children.

In return, Grubman claimed, the analyst was taking a more favourable view of telecoms giant AT&T. Weill was courting its top executive. Grubman has said he was joking, but the mud stuck to everyone involved.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that Spitzer’s replacement as attorney-general, Andrew Cuomo, has been resisting Greenberg’s freedom-of-information requests to hand over the e-mails.

According to court records, Cuomo’s office has used a number of arguments to block their release: the e-mails are privileged prosecutorial documents exempt from public view; the office does not have access to a private account; the e-mails don’t exist in attorneygeneral document searches.

But we all know e-mails don’t go anywhere, ever, and they’ll eventually be uncovered. It seems a shame, but it looks like Spitzer is in for another embarrassing moment just as he is beginning his public rehabilitation.

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