The Department of Justice under President Obama was and is a joke!

The Justice Department under President Obama and Eric Holder was and is a joke!

Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama made sure that none of their friends in the banking industry went to jail for the crimes they committed. A large number of Covington & Burling’s Law Firm corporate clients are mega-banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Lanny Breuer who ran the criminal division for Holder’s Justice Department and Eric Holder were lawyers for Covington & Burling prior to taking positions under Obama in the Justice Department.  Their specialty was protecting corporations, especially banking, investment and savings corporation from prosecution – looking for loopholes in the law that would allow them to escape prosecution if caught.

Covington & Burling was given the American Lawyer “Litigation Department of the Year,” award in March 2014 for getting clients accused of financial fraud off with  only a slap-on-the-wrist fines. if you want to understand what Eric Holder did for the perpetrators and firms of the largest financial fraud in history that blew up the nation’s economy in 2008, you only have to read one line from his former employer praising Eric Holder: “He helped them, get the best deal they could possibly get.”

As for homeowners, they received a raw deal, in the form of little or no compensation for some of the greatest consumer abuses in American history. As far back as 2004, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud, which they said would have “as much impact as the Savings & Loan crisis.” They were wrong; it was worse.

By the time the bubble collapsed, the recession hit and Holder took over the Justice Department, Wall Street was a target-rich environment for any federal prosecutor. Physical evidence to an untold number of crimes was available in court filings and county recording offices. The proof was there. Chief Executives could have been easily held criminally responsible for misrepresenting their risk management controls to bank regulators.

In 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, giving $165 million to the Justice Department to staff the investigations necessary to bring those accountable for the financial crisis to justice. Keep in mind this was a Democrat House and Senate that gave Eric Holder the funds to prosecute these C.E.O.’s. Yet, not one major executive has been sent to jail for their role in the crisis.

The department has put real housewives in jail for mortgage fraud, but not real bankers. The D.O).J. saved their firepower for people who manage to defraud banks, not for banks who manage to defraud people. Most of the “investigations” of financial institutions over six years was swiftly moved to cash settlements, often without holding anyone responsible for admitting wrong doing or providing a detailed description of what they did wrong.

The National Mortgage Settlement, for example, was touted by Holder’s Justice Department as a $25 billion deal. In reality, banks were able to pay one-quarter of that penalty with other people’s money, lowering principal balances on loans they didn’t even own. Banks were even allowed to satisfy their obligations under the settlements through routine business practices (including some, like making loans to low-income homeowners that make them money.

A series of securities fraud settlements with JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup, which the Department of Justice and Eric Holder approved and claimed cost the banks $36.65 billion, actually cost them about $11.5 billion and shareholders, no executives bore that cost. Wall Street Journal has found out that only 25% of the fines were actually collected from the corporations involved in the banking crisis.

The Department of Justice Inspector General criticized this in a March 2014 report and revealed that that the Department of Justice de-prioritized mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat” from 2009-2011.

The banking sector’s get-out-of-jail free card gave them confidence that they could commit the same crimes again, with little if any legal implications and if you think the problem is not continuing you are naive.

The decision to protect banks instead of homeowners should be laid at the feet of President Obama and his administration. Guess where Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer work today – the law firm of Covington and Burling the law firm that represented the big banks during the crisis.

 Eric Holder was U.S. Attorney General when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. But, nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25, 2014 that he plan to step down, without bringing to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst  failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice. Eric Holder was careful not to step down until the statue of limitation ran out on prosecuting banking executives.

In both the U.S. savings and loan debacle of the late 1980's and the Enron-era accounting frauds of the early 2000's, there were more than 1,000 successful felony convictions in white-collar crime cases. In those cases Federal Prosecutors prioritized the top executives of the corporations responsible and sought convictions.

In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest price-rigging cartel in history — the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the interest rates at which banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuance in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5)  failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.

How quick minority voters either forget or never knew that Eric Holder blamed them for the banking crisis.  Eric Holder stated on more than one occasion that mortgage fraud was largely an ethnic crime that was committed almost exclusively by primarily ethnic borrowers rather than the officers controlling the lenders.

Eric Holder in June 2016 still maintain the Department of Justice did not have the evidence to criminally prosecute banks – how much more evidence did he need? Eric Holder, for a combination of political and self-serving reasons, held his department back.

Career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no. Aggressive attorneys wanted to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them. From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990's on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law. So many people within the Treasury Department were pressuring Eric Holder to charge HSBC than he finally on November 7, presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC and no criminal charges and no admission of guilt. HSBC negotiated until December getting employee bonus’ guaranteed, a guarantee no employee would ever be criminally prosecuted and the fine reduced and that no one at the bank would ever be tried for aiding terrorist – Eric Holder agreed.

Will President Obama share these facts while on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton or will he continue to blame George Bush and the Republican Party for all that is wrong with the United States Government?

September 16, 2016 - Deutsche Bank stated  today they have no intention of settling with the U.S. Justice Department over their part in the mortgage/banking scandal for $14 billion dollars. They will not accept any offer higher than Eric Holder gave U.S. Banks.