Attorney general vows fair Cornell probe, hires someone else to be fair, then won't discuss it

…(cont) Here is what I have written down. On October 2nd, the paper quoted the President saying the Cornell students "won't get a fair shake" with the state's attorney general, Letitia James, leading the investigation into them. I wrote those words down exact, because I wanted to get them right. Six days later, on October 8th, a former prosecutor from her own office told the Post that a year-long investigation into the President had found nothing, and that investigators were told to keep digging anyway, because, as the whistleblower put it, "what Tish wanted, Tish got." I don't know what that has to do with Cornell. Does it tell you anything about how an investigation runs in that office, generally, before Cornell ever came up?

Five days after that, on October 13th, the same office was fielding demands that the Attorney General step aside from the Cornell case, over something she had said publicly, backing the young woman who filed the lawsuit, before the investigation had even opened. Three days after that, on October 16th, she was on camera being asked about exactly that, and the line printed under the video, word for word, the way the story ran it, was this: "Letitia James vows a fair probe into the alleged Cornell University gang rape, but Trump and defense attorneys question her impartiality." I wrote that one down twice. I didn't believe I'd copied it right the first time.

Eight days after that — October 24th — the Post reported her office was hiring an outside lawyer to run the Cornell probe. Not help with it. Run it.

I went to the bank on Friday to deposit a check, and they sent me to four different windows for one transaction. First window said I needed a form. Second window had the form, but wanted a stamp from the first window. Third window had the stamp, but said the form was out of date. Fourth window had the current form, no stamp required, and didn't explain why the first three existed. I'm not saying that's the same as hiring somebody else to do your own job. I'm asking how many windows a person needs, for one deposit.

Here is where it stands this weekend. One day after the outside-lawyer story ran, on Sunday, James was campaigning in Crown Heights, and a reporter asked her, on the record, about the Cornell case. She did not answer. She smiled, the story said, and gave this instead — I'm reading it straight off the page, because I don't trust myself to get it right from memory: "We're here today to talk about elections, early elections."

Twenty-three days, start to finish, this one runs. The vow, the camera, the outside lawyer, and now that. One office, one case, four stops along the way, and at the end of it the question on the table got swapped for a different one.

Oh — before you go. The form at the Board of Elections, the one I filled out twice this week, the new one — it was about early voting. So, it turns out, was her answer. Is that where this one ends up too? In elections?