Columnist Jon Ralston: Cortez Masto took right approach

Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005 | 8:09 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face with Jon Ralston on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the daily e-mail newsletter RalstonFlash.com. His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or throughe-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

So how do you approach a high-profile issue when your opponent has seized the ethical, political and legal high ground?

Very carefully.

So when Attorney General (for a cup of coffee) George Chanos geometrically amplified his name recognition by standing grandly at a Las Vegas City Council meeting and boldly declaring he will go where no local government has ever gone -- asking tough questions about land deals with Bill Walters -- Catherine Cortez Masto had a problem.

The Democratic contender for the state's chief law enforcement job couldn't very well assail Chanos for looking into transactions that have gained wide notoriety and generated a much fouler odor than the city wastewater treatment plant near the deed-restricted land. And what could she say after Chanos announced he would recuse himself because he had a land deal pending before the city?

He's not only tough on possible public corruption; he's ethically sensitive, too. If this were next October, it might be game over. But it's not, and Cortez Masto knew she would have to say something about what Chanos had done -- and Tuesday on "Face to Face" she tried to thread that needle and did it adroitly.

She would not align herself with a dud of a Democratic Party missile launched at Chanos last week that asserted he had a "ready, aim, recuse" record on the case. Said Democratic spinmeistress Kirsten Searer: "George Chanos showed a serious lapse in ethical judgment by knowingly interjecting himself into a case where he has a conflict of interest."

This is just silly.

First, Chanos actually has no conflict, and it can be argued that he went too far in recusing himself because he has an unrelated land deal pending before the city.

Second, by removing himself from the probe, which I am sure he does not want to do, Chanos erases any possible taint on the probe's results.

And, third, do the Democrats want to be the party that says the attorney general should not stick his nose into possible cases of public corruption?

Cortez Masto doesn't think so. She insisted on the program that the public has the right to know all the facts, yada, yada, yada. But she added that she would have approached the probe differently.

"I would have talked with the DA as well as the sheriff and talked with them about the investigation they had done to make sure I wasn't duplicating an investigation that already occurred and talked with them about additional facts that they weren't aware of that were out there," she said on the program.

Very politically savvy. And it has the added benefit of making sense.

She stopped short of accusing Chanos of grandstanding -- and I gave her several opportunities -- repeatedly insisting only that she would have handled it differently.

Chanos surely should have consulted with Sheriff Bill Young and District Attorney David Roger before he leapt to announce his probe. But as the attorney general rightly has pointed out, serious questions persist about whether the statute of limitations on some of the possible crimes has expired if they were not discovered until recently.

And we are still learning more about what led to the Nov. 2 rush to undo the deed restriction by the lapdog council.

I still find it deliciously ironic that Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the erstwhile law enforcement-basher, invited the cops into this mess, which may be merely a standard but sleazy case of juice.

Now, this has blown up into such a fiasco for the city, complete with whistleblowers and an embarrassingly lame cover-up, that it's inevitable Chanos will be joined by other law enforcement agencies -- if they aren't already involved.

So give a poised and careful Cortez Masto credit for focusing on how Chanos did what he did, not what he did. She knows what others surely understand:

If Chanos doesn't want the appearance of a conflict of interest to hurt him, Cortez Masto surely doesn't want the appearance of siding with the city, which could be much more devastating by the time all the facts have been laid out closer to Election Day 2006.