Attorney General Elliot Spitzer (Photo, as it appears on www.lwvny.org

Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, who announced his bid for New York Governor in 2006, would surely clean up house in the State capital Albany, according to his former New York State Solicitor General Preeta Bansal.

Speaking to News India-Times, Bansal said she did not wish to speculate on whether she will have any position in Spitzer’s office if he is elected governor in 2006 nor if she will be part of his campaign. Democrats have generally greeted Spitzer’s announcement positively, and some polls have shown Spitzer’s rating higher than incumbent Republican Governor George Pataki.

Former State Solicitor General Preeta Bansal (Photo, as it appears on www.sree.net)

“I’m very close to Eliot and will be continuing to talk to him. He’ll do great things (if elected). He’s been shaking things up and he’ll shake up Albany. If anyone can do it, he can,”she said.

Bansal is credited with helping Spitzer develop his activist state-level prosecutorial legal ideology following on the Supreme Court’s “new federalism” jurisprudence. She was solicitor general from 1999 to 2001, and responsible for a lot of the high profile cases Spitzer filed against big Wall Street firms’ accounting practices.

In an article in The New York Law Journal on Dec. 8 which noted Bansal’s role in fashioning the attorney general’s legal strategy, Bansal spoke highly of the AG, “In clerking at the Supreme Court, I’ve been around some very, very smart people. I would say that, hands down, Eliot is the smartest person I have ever worked with. And because he is so smart, he is not threatened by having good and smart people around him. In fact, he gets a charge out of it.”

Bansal told News India-Times that as Spitzer’s solicitor general, apart from her other duties overlooking the work of 600 lawyers and directing some 45 lawyers, handling appeals from the state and its myriad agencies, and writing opinions for the attorney general, her “primary (and thankless) role (was) in the quality control for the office –– initiating and institutionalizing reforms to markedly enhance the quality of legal output, in order to serve judges as our principal constituency.” While she was solicitor general, the New York Attorney General’s Office and she received the ‘Best United States Supreme Court Brief’ award from the National Association of Attorneys General for three consecutive years.

Currently, Bansal is a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and an attorney in the

law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & From.