The Investigation Show, Round Two

The state Senate Investigations Committee just announced they’ll have their second public hearing on Thursday, September 6 in Albany.

And scheduled to appear there is the Inspector General herself, Kristine Hamann, who has come under fire for not producing a report of her investigation into Eliot Spitzer’s office, nor announcing she had a conflict of interest when the person she reports to, Rich Baum, became a subject of her inquiry.

The first hearing was a quite a show, with Republicans grilling witnesses and Democrats denouncing the entire proceeding as a partisan show-trial.

I called Hamann’s office just now to confirm her attendance.

In her only interview about the subject, Hamann defending herself to the New York Times [archived] by saying that there’s always a conflict of interest.

''In almost every case, you can argue a conflict,'' she said of her job. ''An inspector general's office is within the organization, so normal analyses of conflict can't really apply here because you are necessarily within the organization. But if you say that an organization doesn't have the right to police itself, how can an organization really try and move forward?''

Does anyone know of any useful precedent from how other states have handled this sort of thing?