white collar crime
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see trump felony convictions
SEE GOP FRAUD
BONDI BRO?
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/stock-trading/
MOC started by peter schweizer docu?!
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CONTEXT? JDV SPOZED TO FIGHT? SEE PARDONS
07/02/26
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an 5 26
President Donald Trump and his supporters are focusing on alleged fraud cases, from accusations against Minnesotan Somali-American daycares to supposed home-care fraud and Medicaid/Medicare fraud. Yet as one conservative commentator pointed out, these same Trump supporters are singing a very different tune when it comes to one of their own.
“In what appears to be a coordinated effort on X, MAGA influencers as varied as a pro-Trump rapper and a Gateway Pundit editor are calling for leniency for Utah businessman Andrew McCubbins, arguing that his conviction for looting $89 million in Medicare money isn’t really that big of a deal, all things considered,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote on Thursday. “McCubbins is the former head of a Utah company that was found to have ordered unnecessary genetic testing, with nurses and doctors bribed to request the tests for patients.”
Sommer added that McCubbins pled guilty to all three charges in September 2020, had to forfeit his multi-million-dollar Utah house and testified at a co-conspirator’s trial about his crimes. Yet McCubbins also financially supported projects near and dear to MAGA hearts, most notably by executive producing the 2023 film “Sound of Freedom,” which promoted the QAnon conspiracy theories of alleged serial sexual abuser Tim Ballard and reportedly grossed almost $20 million in ticket sales by conservatives buying thousands of unused tickets. For these reasons, McCubbins is widely admired in MAGA circles regardless of his criminal background.
“With McCubbins’s sentencing on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Medicare looming later this month, conservative influencers have launched a months-long—and what appears to be coordinated—effort to win him a pardon, or at least to get the Justice Department to drop the case,” Sommer wrote. These include the pro-Trump rapper Forgatio Blow, who calls himself “Trump’s nephew,” who wrote that “the math on this case just doesn’t add up and addressing the U.S. pardon attorney as “My nxgga” (sic). Blow has previously described himself as “the Donald Trump of rap.”
“In the music industry, everyone loved me, but nobody wanted to support me on a big record label,” Blow said in 2022. “Or everybody wants to support me and be my friend when they need something from me. I felt like that was like Trump—before he was president, everybody loved him… Said he’s going to be the president and they said, ‘No way.’ And then what happened? He became the president. That’s like me and music. I said I was going to make it through, you know, being a white rapper.”
A pro-Trump influencer in Spain cited McCubbins’ involvement in Ballard’s group that he and his supporters claim rescued children, although others have described it as a scam for allegedly exaggerating and/or fabricating claims and ignoring Ballard’s own alleged serial sexual misconduct.
“Sound of Freedom showed the grit needed to save kids,” Ada Lluch, the pro-Trump influencer in Spain, claimed. “Andrew McCubbins was a key operative on those missions. It is crazy that a case from the last administration is still active against him.”
Sommer had a different interpretation besides the desire to free McCubbins.
“One thing that is striking about the push to obtain a pardon for McCubbins is the uncomfortable racial double standard it suggests: After all, the right-wing anti-fraud campaign this year has largely focused on minority and immigrant communities whose populations include many people dependent on government support for services and funding, like those Somali-American daycare providers in Minnesota,” Sommer wrote. “For right-wingers to push for leniency for a well-connected white guy who confessed to white-collar fraud has an odor of hypocrisy.”
McCubbins, Ballard and others also have not condemned Trump for his decades-long and close friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly facilitated Trump sexually assaulting a 13-year-old in the 1980s.
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an 5 26
Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies.
“Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” reports Bloomberg. “Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump.”
But “more than a dozen former prosecutors and defense lawyers” — speaking anonymously — say “there is mounting concern that the pursuit of Trump’s agenda has triggered an exodus of experienced prosecutors and hampered Miami’s expertise in building major white collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases.”
According to Bloomberg, many expressed concern that the high-profile drug, corruption, fraud and money laundering prosecutions that the district is known for will “fall by the wayside” while Trump sends his DOJ lieutenants and GOP allies to fucus on the doings of Biden and Obama from years ago.
Several dozen attorneys in the Southern District of Florida have been fired, quit or retiredsince Trump’s second term began in January 2025, which undermined the talent pool for prosecuting complex cases, say anonymous sources familiar with the office. One unit dedicated to prosecuting economic crimes is down to about a dozen attorneys from the more than 30 it traditionally had.
“A top Blanche aide earlier this year relocated to be a prosecutor in the office. Then, last month, an attorney overseeing the investigation was replaced with former US attorney and Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova following a disagreement over how best to proceed, according to people familiar with the situation,” reports Bloomberg. “Multiple grand jury subpoenas have gone out in recent weeks, and FBI officials have been conducting a flurry of interviews, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.”
But as prosecutors neglect investigations against legitimate suspected wrongdoers, Bloomberg reports Trump’s focus on his political hit list is coming up dry with prosecutors struggling with cases against current and former government officials considered to be enemies of the president.
“Charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in Virginia were dismissed last year,” said Bloomberg, and an additional case against Comey last month in North Carolina has kindled criticism that US law enforcement is being directed wielded for retribution for Trump.
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raw story
Criminal corporations are not people — but Trump just pardoned one anyway - Raw Story
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler toldThe Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Interceptthat the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
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an 3 25
'White collar defendants' and crypto entrepreneurs 'cast themselves as victims' in bid for Trump’s mercy
an 2/22
amid push for ban, Lawmakers traded $355 million of stock in 2021
As the coronavirus pandemic continued to roil the U.S. economy and take lives in 2021, congressional lawmakers and their family members went on a stock buying and selling...
burr sold stock w/ priv info
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/white-collar-crime/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/heres-how-american-billionaires-have-profiteered-off-the-robert-reich/
Since the start of the pandemic, American billionaires have been cleaning up. As more than 50 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance, billionaires became $637 billion richer. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has ballooned 59 percent. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s, 39 percent. Walmart’s Walton family has added $25 billion.
Big drug company CEOs and their major investors are doing nicely, too. Since the start of the pandemic, Big Pharma has raised prices on over 250 prescription drugs, 61 of which are being used to treat Covid-19.
Apologists say this is the “free market” responding to supply and demand – the barons of Big Tech, online retailing, and Big Pharma merely providing what consumers desperately need during the pandemic.
But the market also operates under laws that ban profiteering, price gouging, and monopolizing, and that tax excess profits in wartime. Where did they go?
the Trump administration hasn’t enforced them.
Trump is also ignoring laws that ban trades on insider information. The White House is distributing billions in subsidies and loans to select corporations – enabling CEOs and boards to load up on stocks and stock options just before deals are announced, then rake in fat profits after stock prices surge.
Insiders from at least 11 companies have sold shares worth over $1 billion after such announcements, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
In late June, a San Francisco company called Vaxart announced that the Trump administration had selected it to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Presto. The value of stock options distributed to company insiders just weeks before increased six-fold. Stock options held by Vaxart’s CEO went from $4.3 million to more than $28 million.
Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass., has never brought a vaccine to market, but company insiders have sold some $248 million of shares – most of them after the company was selected in April to receive Trump funding. (Moderna plans to sell its vaccine for profit although taxpayers have footed its research and development.)
The most blatant involves the venerable old camera and film maker, Kodak. On July 28, Trump announced a $765 million deal with the firm to bring drug production back to the United States. He called it “one of the most important deals in the history of the U.S. pharmaceutical industries,” even though Kodak isn’t even a pharmaceutical company.
Before the announcement, Kodak had handed its board of directors 240,000 stock options, and just the day before had given its CEO 1.75 million stock options. After Trump’s announcement, Kodak shares shot up more than 2,757 percent. Suddenly, the board’s stock options were worth about $4 million, and the CEO’s, about $50 million.
Is this sort of insider trading against the law? You bet. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the deal, now temporarily on hold.
But the SEC’s co-director of enforcement, Steven Peikin, who had been investigating several of the deals involving the White House and corporate insiders – including Kodak – has resigned, without explanation. Another in the lengthening list of independent regulators and inspectors general forced out by Trump?
This much is clear: Trump and his Republican enablers won’t provide $600 per week to tens of millions of Americans who need the money to survive the pandemic, because Trump and the GOP believe the money undermines incentives to work.
Yet Trump has no problem letting billionaires illegally profit off the pandemic. He thinks that as long as they buoy the stock market, they’re helping the American economy.
That’s pure rubbish. The stock market is not America. The richest 1 percent of Americans own half the value of all shares of stock held by American households. The richest**10 percent owns 92 percent**.For years now, stock prices have risen largely because profits have been siphoned from the wages of ordinary workers.
In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, stock prices are almost back to where they were before the pandemic began. Big corporations and major investors are doing fine. Billionaires are doing better than ever. But most Americans are sinking fast.
This isn’t just unfair. Much of it is illegal.
==
Several U.S. ambassadors actively shed their stock holdings as President Donald Trump tried to downplay the coronavirus outbreak in its early stages,” according to CNBC.
Ambassadors to Uruguay, France, Morocco and Italy sold shares in transactions that could have made them millions of dollars, according to financial disclosure filings reviewed by CNBC. Much of their sales were in January and continued throughout February, the records show. Their transactions line up with a timeline of federal and congressional announcements as the virus started sweeping across the globe earlier this year.
==
sen intell comm?
https://www.propublica.org/article/senator-dumped-up-to-1-6-million-of-stock-after-reassuring-public-about-coronavirus-preparedness
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/are-trump-and-his-ilk-manipulating-the-markets-for-personal-gain-investigative-business-reporter-william-cohan-lays-out-the-evidence/
no lnx
Are Trump and his ilk manipulating the markets for personal gain?Investigative business reporter William Cohan lays out the evidence
Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 26, 2020
Donald Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstructing a congressional investigation into his attempt to blackmail a foreign country into aiding him in the 2020 presidential election. He is now the third president in American history to have earned that ignominious distinction.
Trump will not be convicted by the Republicans in the Senate for his crimes.
The public evidence is damning. There is no evidence that could possibly exonerate him. Trump is publicly bragging about committing crimes against the Constitution and the American people. The Republican Party and its propaganda news media have decided to ignore reality and fully immerse themselves in TrumpWorld. They have pledged total loyalty to him and no evidence will move them. The Republicans and their news media and public are authoritarian lemmings.
Donald Trump is America’s first mercenary president. He is obviously and unapologetically corrupt. Like other authoritarians, Trump has no conception of the public good or the public interest. Power and money are his only goals.
Why would he (and his family and inner circle) stop at “only” using his properties, name and other forms of influence peddling to make money from being president of the United States?
In a series of articles for Vanity Fair, investigative reporter and author William Cohan has asserted that Donald Trump and his inner circle appear to be manipulating the stock market for their own personal financial gain. Cohan believes this likely or possible insider trading may involve hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions.
Cohan is a New York Times bestselling author of several books about finance and Wall Street, including “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World” and “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street.” His most recent book is “Why Wall Street Matters.”
In this conversation, Cohan shares his evidence connecting high-profile events such as Trump’s order to assassinate Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani with the purchase of defense industry stocks and futures contracts — hours before the military action took place. He also explains how Trump’s deregulation of oversight and other protections would enable such a scheme, and identifies the various people in Trump’s orbit who could facilitate insider trading.
Cohan is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and a columnist for the New York Times. His writing has also been featured in The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune and Politico.
As usual, this transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to my full conversation with William Cohan through the player embedded below.
What do we know about Trump’s character and apparent propensity for corruption?
Trump talks like a thug. He owned casinos in Atlantic City. He is a real estate guy working in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. But Trump is not smart enough to be a mob boss. He’s just not clever enough.
He’s never had anybody tell him that he couldn’t do something. So in one sense, Trump is liberated. He can conjure up something and there is nobody telling him he cannot do it. He doesn’t have shareholders. He doesn’t have a board of directors — and that’s the way he behaves as president. No accountability. Now Trump is finding out that it’s not quite as easy as he thought, which is why he got himself impeached. He probably will slither through that in the end. Yet he just takes an attitude that can do whatever he wants. When Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it — he could probably get away with it at this point. He believes it.
Donald Trump has no conception of the public interest or the public good. So why wouldn’t he run the White House and the presidency in such a way as to get more money by all available means?
That is exactly what is happening now. I’ve written three pieces for Vanity Fair about the trading and the E-mini market in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. There was little response to the first one. In response to the second piece, the critics went ballistic. They tried to characterize me as some type of lunatic. The third piece has also barely registered. It is so clear that people are trading on information that they know will move the market, and it is clear to me that they are getting that information from the White House and Trump and his cabal.
Whether Trump and the cabal are directly profiting from it. I don’t know. Moreover, I don’t know how we in the public will ever know. Donald Trump has been a con man his entire life. He conned people in the real estate business. He conned people in the casino business, costing creditors of both of those businesses billions of dollars in losses. Trump destroyed billions of dollars in shareholder value. And then Trump conned the American people into electing him president of the United States.
Why do you think your story has not captured the 24/7 news cycle? It seems tailor-made: It involves Trump, his regime, money and potential illegal behavior. Moreover, Trump has been impeached. The timing could not be better for this story.
Nobody did anything with my reporting in July. In October, Stephanie Ruhle and MSNBC had me on.Congressman Ted Lieu also mentioned these questions. There were other congressmen calling for investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. There were also U.S. senators calling for investigations. Elizabeth Warren has called for an investigation into whether Trump gave information at Mar-a-Lago to his supporters, which then allowed them to buy defense stocks prior to his assassinating Soleimani. But if you are expecting Trump’s SEC to ratify my reporting through a proper investigation, think again.
Do you think that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is going to say, “Yes, there are people trading inside” on quasi-inside information, or what should be inside information? To make such an admission would mean it looks like trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is rigged. Are you kidding me? There’s no way they’re going to admit to that. Everything is so corrupt now. There is no integrity, even when there is prima facie evidence that people were making hundreds of millions of dollars trading on information that others do not have. Whether it’s technically “insider trading” or not is difficult to discern, because of course they are not getting corporate information.
Whoever is doing this is getting the stock market moving by using national security information, which is perhaps even better than getting corporate information. So if you are a person who knows that Donald Trump is going to assassinate Soleimani, you can be pretty sure that the markets are going to react negatively to that event and defense stocks are then going to go up. It’s not a hard trade to put on, but to actually ratify that fact and admit to such a thing is not going to happen in TrumpWorld.
I am left wondering: Why hasn’t the New York Times or the Washington Post picked this up?
I’ve found that other media outlets were quite anxious about my reporting too. CNBC had me on for a long segment. Bloomberg couldn’t wait to attack the whole idea of people getting tips from inside or around the Trump administration, because Bloomberg’s whole business model depends on the public thinking that the markets are fair and open and not rigged. Bloomberg and others with the same commitment must do everything they can to bat down this idea that somehow people are getting inside information that isn’t available to everybody else.
How did your reporting at Vanity Fair about possible insider trading and other questionable behavior come together?
It is pretty simple. The people whose business is to trade these E-mini’s —these future contracts that are tied to the S&P 500 stock index — do this professionally. They have been doing this for 10, 20, 30 and in some instances 40 years. They see these anomalies in the trading. Trading has a certain pattern and a certain rhythm. It’s akin to the news business where if you’re a journalist on a beat and you’ve been working it long enough, you know when there is something anomalous. Well if you’re a trader who’s trading E-mini’s and that’s what you do all day and you see something anomalous and then you can trace it back to news events, well then you can’t help but wonder what’s going on and why people are making what appears to be hundreds of millions of dollars.
You make $170 million in a day, then you’re not going to wait around and see if that’s going to be $200 million in two days. You’re going to take your money and go. The traders were seeing these things and they reached out to me. I reported what the traders were telling me, and I had it well-documented. They can always have other explanations for this: Maybe this group of traders got incredibly lucky? Maybe they just called it right? They called it right in July, then called it right in October, and then called it right with the killing of Soleimani. Maybe some traders just got totally lucky all those times. But that’s not really the way it works.
We know that insider trading is rampant, especially in times like this where regulators are basically asleep at their desks, because the Trump administration has told them to be asleep at their desks. That is what big business wants — as little regulation as possible. Trump likes this idea of rewarding people who are loyal to him. He also likes padding his own bank account. Who knows whether any of the money from the trading gets kicked back to him? We’ll never know. Literally, Donald Trump is the man who doesn’t release his taxes. Trump also does not divest his own businesses. He is incredibly and embarrassingly corrupt. The question of these trades is potentially just one more symptom of that corruption.
How do we separate those people who are just careful observers of current affairs and doing nothing illegal or untoward from those who may be getting inside tips about what stocks to trade or investments to make?
Here’s the problem. I don’t know who’s behind these trades. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange knows who’s behind these trades. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission can find out who’s behind these trades. The SEC can find out who’s behind these trades. The FBI can probably find out who behind these trades.
So they’re basically saying it’s just one big coincidence and people are just getting lucky and doing good smart trading. How are people like you and me, without those kinds of subpoena and regulatory powers, supposed to know what really happened? If the investigators say there’s nothing to it, then what are we and the public supposed to do at that point? There is nothing we can do.
Ultimately, what I’m arguing in my reporting is that there are people who are professional traders who do this for a living, who do this day in and day out and who’ve been doing it during the Obama administration and the George W. Bush administration and, except for 9/11, didn’t see any anomalous trading. Then Donald Trump comes along and it’s one week after the next.
There’s pushing Jerome Powell into lowering interest rates, which obviously Trump knows, if he can get them to do it, will increase the stock market.And then there’s assassinating Soleimani. Which Trump obviously knows is going to move the market. President Trump does not seem to care. The commerce secretary doesn’t seem to care. The Treasury secretary doesn’t seem to care. These people are basically immoral. Donald Trump has selected and surrounded himself with people who are completely immoral and will do whatever it is he asks.
Is Mar-a-Lago a nexus for Trump’s apparent influence peddling and corruption?
Anywhere Trump shows up is a nexus for his influence peddling and corruption. It could be his golf courses or Mar-a-Lago or somewhere else. Gift-giving is a form of currency, influence-buying. Certainly Trump knows that he can buy loyalty from people. And what’s a better way to buy loyalty than if you’re president of United States and you know you’re going to assassinate the No. 2 guy in Iran and that it’s going to move markets.
On Jan. 2, the markets were up big. Soleimani was assassinated at one in the morning, Baghdad time, after the markets here had closed. There was some night trading, which was obviously going to make the markets go down the next day. Killing Gen. Soleimani was going to make the Middle East much more unstable. And what better way to reward your buddies — who were already your buddies, because they’re at Mar-a-Lago, to begin with, on New Year’s Eve — than with this little gift? It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on.
How would one send those signals? How does insider trading work?
Who are the people who know what is going to happen? Who knows about the trade docs? Steve Mnuchin, Robert Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross. Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump, Trump’s kids, Trump’s son-in-law. These people who do have knowledge of certain events are either giving gifts to friends or trying to continue to buy loyalty. What I think is more likely is that there are surrogate traders who are making these trades with inside information. They make the money and then stash it in some sort of account to be gotten back to after they leave office. But again, I don’t know. The people who would know are not cooperating. The head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said that my article in October should have been written in crayon because it was so childlike.
To reiterate: The people who were supposed to be watching and regulating are somehow complicit, looking away, indifferent, etc.?
That is the only way this could work. They were all appointed by Trump. They all owe everything to Trump. Steven Mnuchin was a failed Goldman partner and a failed private equity guy who’s been made Treasury secretary. Mnuchin was plucked from nowhere because he was one of the only people who would raise money for him. This is the reward that he got. Wilbur Ross’ relationship with Donald Trump goes back to restructuring casino credit debt during the 1990s. Wilbur Ross enabled Donald Trump to continue getting paid by his casinos even though he’d sent them into bankruptcy because he represented creditors and that was the deal they cut. These relationships go back, in some cases, a long time and these people truly admire Donald Trump.
What do we know about Donald Trump and Iran, in terms of what you detailed in the Vanity Fair article about potential war profiteering?
He does know how to move markets. And he did know that this was going to be a market-moving event. Either he wanted to profit himself from it or he wanted his friends to profit from it or his family to profit from it. He’s a guy who lies about his net worth. We know he lies about everything.
All one has to do to make a solid bet about a future conflict is to be a careful reader of the news, do research, consult with experts and the like. Therefore, the competitive advantage with insider trading is just a function of time, some insight into future events. Correct?
If it were happening, that is how it would work. For example, Mnuchin doesn’t even have to say what’s happening. He could just say to a contact, buy or sell 10,000 E-mini contracts. Do that every 10 minutes for the next hour and then the market falls and you’ve made $190 million and nobody’s going to say anything. I was a banker for close to 20 years on Wall Street. I’ve seen this behavior with my own eyes. I’ve lived this behavior and now I’ve been writing about it for 16 years.
What is the culture like among those who deal in high finance with these amazingly large amounts of money? What values are rewarded? What does it feel like to make that much money in a day?
They think they’re worth it. They think they deserve it. It’s how they keep score.They’re making all this money. In their minds they deserve to make all this money. Do you think Jeff Bezos thinks for a second that he doesn’t deserve to be the world’s richest man, worth $100 billion? There’s no doubt in their minds that they are worth every penny that they’re getting. There’s no self-doubt. There’s no introspection. Yes, there are some people who are obviously much more civic-minded and ecumenically minded and who are aware of the vast gulf between the rich and poor and income inequality in this country. But they are not so self-aware and troubled to the point of actually doing something about it. Wall Street is not monolithic, of course. There are people who are very moral and very ethical on Wall Street who would never do what I have been reporting about. But there’s obviously a subset of people where that is just not true: If they can get an advantage, then they’ll take it.
In a just world, what would happen as a result of your reporting?
I would get to the bottom of it. I would find out who’s trading and where they’re getting their information. I’m sure it goes right to the top. And that would be the end of Trump, because such behavior is clearly illegal. Although there are those who have made an argument which goes, “Well, that’s not technically insider trading. It’s not corporate information and the insider trading laws apply to corporations. And by the way, until recently, congresspeople could trade on inside information and it was not illegal.”
You could imagine Attorney General Bill Barr making such a legal argument. They got Al Capone on tax evasion. Maybe Trump could get caught on stealing money from traders, the people on the other side of his trade. Because for every winner of $190 million, there are people who’ve lost $190 million. I bet those people are pissed.
1019
Hey Securities and Exchange Commission, if you are watching. Someone is trading on insider info
headlines for white-collar crime this year have largely been grabbed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has uncovered ahuge array of financial crimes in President Donald Trump’s inner circle. But though Mueller’s revelations have shocked the American public consciousness, they were probably not the biggest financial scandals of the year.
On Monday, David P. Weber, a law professor and certified fraud examiner who reviewed the Panama Papers and blew the whistle on investigative misconduct as an assistant inspector general for the Securities and Exchange Commission, wrote an op-ed for The Hill outlining some of the most significant corporate scandals of 2018 — and how they prove Congress needs to ensure greater oversight of the financial system.
Weber specifically points to the scandals at 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund accused of a $4.2 billion embezzlement and fraud scheme with help from legal and auditing firms and a Department of Justice lawyer; Operation Car Wash, the gigantic Brazilian money laundering scandal that has implicated hundreds of politicians including multiple presidents; and the ongoing revelations about how European banks involved in the Panama Papers scandal helped oligarchs and tax evaders steal money around the world.
Though these scandals all occurred overseas, Weber notes, they have all in some way landed on U.S. shores by implicating American businessmen and officials.
The 1MDB scandal, for instance, involved three Goldman Sachs bankers, resulting in criminal charges against the U.S. investment banking giant by Malaysian authorities, and according to The Wall Street Journal, a firm linked to the wife of former RNC official Elliott Broidy was allegedly in talks for a $75 million lobbying contract to persuade the Justice Department to back off investigating 1MDB (Broidy and his wife are not mentioned by name in any of the criminal proceedings). In the Operation Car Wash saga, meanwhile a lawsuit alleges that a U.S. law firm improperly held a “strategy session” with a Brazilian prosecutor.
And perhaps most shockingly, in the E.U. banking scandal, multiple legal officials with the federal government, including the former chief of top financial crimes investigation team FinCEN and the former Treasury undersecretary for counterterrorism, are now providing legal counsel to HSBC and Deutsche Bank, two institutions implicated in the scheme.
“When will Congress act to curtain misconduct by professionals?” laments Weber.
In general, white-collar crime has gone underinvestigated for years — which is arguably why Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen and campaign chair Paul Manafort thought they could get away with bank fraud and tax evasion. But there is likely far more misconduct going on below the surface than we know. This year’s scandals reveal the need for a strong, serious enforcement regime, for the integrity of the financial system and the confidence of the public
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7/15 category, refers to domestic pvt sector fraud, insider trading etc
but may extend a bit with koch sensenbrenner scam on intent:
shd i expand to pullution, predatory loans etc? corp crime?
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chris collins arrested 818, djt 1st supporter: [// between priority and corruption? stockman?]
Here's a story that illustrates how the regime's priorities are playing out in the real world.
According to *Capital& Main*,the regime's "immigration crackdown appears to be crowding out other law enforcement priorities, according to a new analysis of Justice Department data."
A study released Monday by Syracuse University researchers showed that federal immigration prosecutions in June comprised 94 percent of all cases in the five U.S. Attorney districts along the southwest border. The spike in immigration prosecutions comes only a few months after Justice Department data showed that the Trump administration has overseen a 20-year low in white-collar criminal prosecutions.
So they're punishing brown people who are just trying to earn a living, and letting the criminals in tailored suits run amok. And the sad truth is that many working-class Trump supporters would probably approve.
*****
The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to shrink a government agency tasked with identifying looming financial risks, notifying around 40 staff members they would be laid off, according to a person familiar with the change.
The Office of Financial Research "provides a critical function by gathering data on areas such as banking, lending and trading from the country's complex web of federal and state regulators to provide a bird's-eye view of system-wide risks," and is "one of several financial regulators being overhauled under President Donald Trump, including the Financial Stability Oversight Council, also housed within the Treasury, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau."
*****
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ec update burberry burns new clothes to ptotect the brand, "logic" of cap'lism
https://www.alternet.org/poverty-criminalized-wealth-immunized-report-shows-corporate-crime-enforcement-has-plummeted-under
In addition to padding the bottom lines of America's largest corporations by cutting their taxes and eliminating scores of longstanding regulations, President Donald Trump is also protecting major companies' profits by refusing to punish them for ripping off consumers and trampling federal rules that safeguard the planet.
That is the central conclusion of a new Public Citizen analysis out Wednesday, which finds that corporate America has largely been exempt from Trump's so-called "law-and-order" agenda. Titled *Corporate Impunity* (pdf), the report shows that enforcement actions carried out by major government agencies declined drastically during Trump's first year in the White House.
"When it comes to large corporations, the supposedly 'tough-on-crime' Trump administration is undertaking an epic retreat from law enforcement—slashing fines, declining to bring cases against corporate wrongdoers, and cutting enforcement programs," Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The message to big business couldn't be more clear," Weissman added. "Feel free to run roughshod over rules that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, as well as ensure the safety of the cars we drive and protect us against bank rip-offs and consumer fraud."
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According to Public Citizen, the largest drop in enforcement actions came at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is currently headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler after previous agency chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid an ever-growing mountain of scandals.
The consumer group's new analysis shows that EPA penalties against corporate criminals has dropped a staggering 94 percent since Trump took office last year.
The decline in penalties leveled by other White House agencies has been similarly striking.
Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ), for instance, imposed $4.9 billion in penalties against major corporations for violating the law. In contrast, during the last year of the Obama administration—which could hardly be described as tough on corporate crime—the DOJ imposed $51.5 billion in fines against businesses.
Because the Trump administration has demonstrated that it is not interested in holding corporations accountable for defrauding consumers and wrecking the environment, Public Citizen argues in its report that we can expect an even larger wave of corporate crime in the near future."The greedy leader sets the pace," noted legal scholar Jennifer Taub in response to Public Citizen's figures. "Under the Trump doctrine, it's corruption without accountability all the way down."
"If the chances of being prosecuted for lawbreaking drop and the penalties when caught are slight, we should expect a surge in corporate wrongdoing," the analysis notes. "That means more workers needlessly injured and killed on the job. It means more consumers ripped off by predatory lenders... It also means a greatly increased chance of corporate catastrophes, on the scale of the BP Gulf oil disaster and the 2008 financial crash, both of which can be traced directly to regulatory enforcement failures."
Succinctly summarizing America's two-tiered justice system—which Trump has tilted even further in favor of the rich by letting corporations run "roughshod"—Public Citizen's Rick Claypool wrote, "While poverty is criminalized, wealth is immunized."
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bell & h
Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, LLP assists clients with the defense of administrative enforcement actions brought by federal, state and local governmental agencies for violations of laws involving campaigns, elections, lobbying and conflicts-of-interest. The firm also represents clients in audits of federal, state and local campaign and lobbying reports. more>>>
Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, LLP also associates with
experienced criminal law counsel in cases which raise potential
issues of criminal exposure in the campaign, lobbying and conflict-of-interest areas.
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/13002/koch-criminal-justice-reform-trojan-horse
Brendan Fischer and Lisa Graves
Charles and David Koch have received positive press for backing a bipartisan effort to reform American criminal justice laws, which have helped make the U.S. the world's biggest jailer and whose burdens have fallen disproportionately on people of color.
But, as the Kochs ride the wave of momentum toward criminal justice reform, it is becoming increasingly clear that part of their agenda would actually make it harder to prosecute corporate violations of environmental and financial laws that protect the public from corporate wrongdoing. The changes would make it harder to hold executives and their employees responsible for violating U.S. laws and would protect their financial interests, at the public's expense.
Over at least the past five years, theKochs and Koch-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been pushing to increase the "intent" standard for criminal violations, particularly for so-called "white collar" crime and executive suite criminals.
This under-reported aspect of the Koch criminal justice reform agenda has been elevated in recent weeks, and could potentially reap big benefits for Koch Industries and other big corporate players.
"Intent" Requirement Would Block Many Corporate Criminal Prosecutions
Legislation to make the criminal justice system fairer passed the U.S. Senate with bipartisan support this winter. As the U.S. House of Representatives has taken up the matter, the bipartisan consensus has begun to fray with a controversial proposal lifted directly from the Koch playbook.
A bill that passed the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last month, sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), doesn't address mass incarceration, one of the primary concerns that progressives have been raising for years. His bill would instead overhaul many federal criminal laws by requiring prosecutors to prove that a person or corporation "knowingly" engaged in illegal conduct and additionally "knew" or should have known that the conduct violated federal law. Koch Industries is one of his top contributors in this election cycle.
The bill's default criminal intent standard is strikingly similar to the ALEC "Criminal Intent Protection Act," and tracks policies promoted by Koch-backed organizations for the past five years. As the Center for Media and Democracy has documented, Koch Industries is a major funder and leader of ALEC, and the Koch brothers have underwritten ALEC through foundations they control and organizations they fund.
The proposal "would make it much harder for prosecutors to criminally prosecute companies that swindle the public, endanger their workers, poison the environment or otherwise imperil consumers," said Rob Weissman, President of the public interest group Public Citizen.
Criminal laws for acts of violence typically have an "intent" requirement, which requires that prosecutors prove that a person intended to cause harm and violate the law before a long prison sentence can be imposed. This intent requirement is known in legal terms as "mens rea," which is Latin for "guilty mind."
But for a number of white collar crimes, such as environmental violations and financial crimes under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, federal law does not require that prosecutors prove that a company or its leaders intended to violate the law by polluting waterways, for example, or crashing the economy.
Instead, the fact of extensive pollution and the harms it causes can be enough to hold a corporation and its leaders criminally liable, because intent can be difficult to prove in a complex corporate structure, with varying layers of hierarchy and lines of authority. Corporate decisions rationalized in the name of cost-cutting or efficiency can lead to tragedies like the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which killed 29 workers. That case recently resulted in a rare criminal conviction for the former CEO of Massey Energy.
"Requiring that prosecutors prove that a corporate executive is both consciously aware of the conduct of their subordinates and consciously aware that the conduct of those subordinates violates criminal law is very, very difficult," said Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri.
"This would make [white collar] prosecutions more difficult than they now are, and they are already hard," Bowman said....
Overcriminalization vs. Mass Incarceration
Although civil rights activists have been focused on mass incarceration—such as changing the mandatory minimum sentences enacted during the drug war that have disproportionately affected people of color, policies that scholars like Michelle Alexander have described as a "new Jim Crow"—the Kochs, ALEC, and other Koch-backed groups have been largely discussing overcriminalization.
Despite how it sounds, "overcriminalization" isn't focused on the disproportionate rate of incarceration of people of color. It is instead focused on the idea that there are too many crimes—and, more specifically, too many white-collar crimes that might affect corporate interests.
"All of the attention here is on whether this will only benefit quote-unquote white-collar criminals, people at financial institutions, people at firms that are damaging the environment," Jeffery Robinson, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said about the Sensenbrenner bill.
"If it only benefits those people, then I haven't seen any evidence that there is any over-incarceration among that group. In fact, we see very few prosecutions of such individuals."
That is, corporations and their leaders are not often federally prosecuted and convicted. In fact, many Americans have expressed deep disappointment that more corporations and bankers were not prosecuted following the gambling on Wall Street that led to the economic crash in 2008, unlike the nearly 1,000 prosecutions following the Savings & Loan crisis in the late 1980s.
"To a considerable extent, deferred prosecutions—in which the Justice Department agrees not to prosecute in exchange for a promise by corporate defendants not to violate the law in the future—have replaced actual prosecutions, undermining any kind of deterrent effect" for criminal penalties, Public Citizen's Weissman added. Deferred prosecutions are almost unheard of outside of the white collar crime context.
Some have expressed general concern that there are too many federal offenses with criminal penalties and too many that don't specify an intent standard, an issue that is being studied in the Senate bill. However, Koch-backed groups have been strongly focused on white-collar crimes, and their "solution"—the blanket imposition of a strict intent standard on every federal crime, as opposed to less-stringent "negligence" or "recklessness" standards—would undermine the few corporate criminal prosecutions that do take place.
For example, the U.S. Department of Justice has noted that—if the Sensenbrenner bill had been law—it could not have secured a guilty plea in last year's case against Jensen Farms, whose failure to follow food safety standards with its cantaloupe led to a listeria outbreak that killed 33 people. Imposing a default intent requirement could affect prosecutions for violations of laws like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Resource Recovery and Compensation Act (RCRA), and many others.
And such changes could also make it harder to prosecute Koch Industries.
As *Forbes* noted, in 2000, "A federal grand jury indicted the privately held company and four of its employees in September on 97 related charges for alleged violations that took place at the company's refinery in Corpus Christi, Tex." Koch Industries was facing "criminal charges, in which the petroleum giant is accused of spewing the toxic chemical benzene into the environment in 1995 and then trying to hide it from government investigators."
Koch and its employees may not have intended to "leak" 91 metric tons of toxic benzene into the air and water around their refinery but their failure to install key protections and fully monitor their emissions resulted in their refinery loading 15 times the legal limit of the toxic substance into the environment.
That is, Koch Industries exposed nearby residents to massive amounts of benzene, which "is a well-established cause of cancer in humans." It is a "group 1" carcinogen because studies have documented that it causes acute myeloid leukemia in humans, and it may also cause lymphocytic leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. It can also result in reduced production of bone marrow and suppress T-cells, which makes people more vulnerable to infections. It has also been found to lead to chromosomal aberrations and can reduce birth weight and cause other health problems.
But then George W. Bush became president and John Ashcroft was named Attorney General. In the 2000 election, David Koch was one of the top 30 donors to Bush and the Republican party in the U.S., contributing $378,500 directly and an untold sum through soft money operations resembling the Triad group that was tied to the Kochs following a Senate investigation, as the Center for Media and Democracy has documented.
The Bush administration reduced the charges, which could have led to fines of more than $500 million, and dropped the case to just one count for a Koch Industries subsidiary, Koch Petroleum Group. "Under the plea agreement, Koch will pay a total of $20 million dollars: $10 million in criminal fines and $10 million for special projects to improve the environment in Corpus Christi—a record amount imposed in an environmental prosecution," the DOJ stated.
It is this experience—the massive emission of a known carcinogen—that the Kochs say sparked their interest in criminal justice reform. Over the years, Koch Industries has been investigated for numerous potential violations of federal and state law. And the Koch reform efforts could help prevent such prosecutions from ever occurring again.
"Overcriminalization: Liberty, and More, At Risk for Corporations and Their Employees"
At times, the Kochs have been clear about the connection between "overcriminalization," a mens reaintent requirement, and their corporate interests.
In September of 2011, for example, Koch Industries' Associate General Counsel, Marsha Rabiteau, gave a presentation titled "Overcriminalization: Liberty, and More, At Risk for Corporations and Their Employees." She had given a nearly identical presentation two years earlier, titled then "Mens rea and other Criminal Law Fundamentals on the Tines of the Public Pitchfork."
That presentation, to a meeting of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel, warned that:
"The life of the corporation, the liberty interests of corporate officers and other employees can be in the cross-hairs of criminal prosecution over matters that often do not rise to true criminal activity."
The solution to the "overcriminalization" problem, Rabiteau said, was to create a default mens rearequirement, as would later appear in the Sensenbrenner bill and in ALEC model legislation.
Rabiteau suggested that attendees visit the Koch-backed Heritage Foundation's "Overcriminalization" project (at overcriminalized.com) and cited a report from Heritage and another Koch-backed group, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called "Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law."
(Rabiteau also suggested that corporations, as a legal fiction, could not form the requisite "intent" to be held liable for a criminal act—although corporations and Koch groups have supported the creation of a right to corporate "free speech" in the form of spending unlimited amounts in elections.)
The Koch Associate General Counsel argued that reforming corporate criminal justice law is needed "so that wrongdoers are punished with laws that are clear and adhere to our Anglo-American heritage."
Although Rabiteau was likely referring to the country's "legal heritage," an appeal to "our Anglo-American heritage" to protect white collar criminals from criminal prosecution—when the burdens of an unjust criminal justice system have largely fallen on non-Anglo-Americans—further indicates the divide between the corporate criminal justice crusaders and civil rights-oriented reformers.
Moreover, America's legal heritage viewed corporate power with deep skepticism and for many years required that corporations have limited charters and durations to prevent them from misuse.
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Compromise, "Without Intent"
The Koch funding for criminal justice reform efforts ramped-up as the federal government began taking steps to reign in financial institutions following the collapse of Wall Street.
As the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill was being debated in 2010, two Koch-backed groups, the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Heritage Foundation issued a comprehensive joint report and project called "Without Intent" criticizing "overcriminalization" and the lack of intent requirements in the federal criminal code.
The co-author of NACDL's "Without Intent" report, which has been repeatedly cited in Congress' debate on criminal justice reform, is Tiffany Joslin, who is now Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Sensenbrenner.
NACDL urged Congress to strike criminal provisions of Dodd-Frank that did not include an intent requirement, but Congress rejected that lobbying. When the law passed later that year, NACDL criticized the bill on these grounds:
"the overwhelming majority of the criminal offenses contained in the bill lack adequate mens rea, or criminal intent, requirements and, consequently, will fail to protect innocent or inadvertent actors from being criminally prosecuted or punished."
Why would the Kochs be concerned about Dodd-Frank and financial regulation? Because a big part of their multi-billion-dollar business comes from oil speculation. The Kochs have long been deeply involved in global financial markets, especially energy and commodity trading.
- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/13002/koch-criminal-justice-reform-trojan-horse#sthash.qFGXGqkw.dpuf
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- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/13002/koch-criminal-justice-reform-trojan-horse#sthash.qFGXGqkw.dpuf
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/prosecution-white-collar-crime-hits-20-year-low
Just a few years after the financial crisis, a new report tells an important story: Federal prosecution of white-collar crime has hit a 20-year low.
The analysis by Syracuse University shows a more than 36 percent decline in such prosecutions since the middle of the Clinton administration, when the decline began. Landing amid calls from Democratic presidential candidates for more Wall Street prosecutions, the report notes that the projected number of prosecutions this year is 12 percent less than last year and 29 percent less than five years ago.
“The decline in federal white-collar crime prosecutions does not necessarily indicate there has been a decline in white-collar crime,” Syracuse researchers note. “Rather, it may reflect shifting enforcement policies by each of the administrations and the various agencies.”
Underscoring that assertion is a recent study by researchers at George Mason University tracking the increased use of special Justice Department agreements that allow corporations -- and often their executives -- to avoid being prosecuted. Before 2003, researchers found, the Justice Department offered almost no such deals. The researchers report that from 2007 to 2011, 44 percent of cases were resolved through the deals -- known as deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements.
In 2012, President Obama pledged to “hold Wall Street accountable” for financial misdeeds related to the financial crisis. But as financial industry donations flooded into Obama’s re-election campaign, his Justice Department officials promoted policies that critics say embodied a “too big to jail” doctrine for financial crime.
In a 2012 speech, for example, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, said “collateral consequences of an indictment,” such as layoffs, losses for corporate shareholders and the health of an industry, factor into the Obama administration’s prosecutorial decisions.
“In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders,” said Breuer.
Similarly, in 2013, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, told congressional lawmakers that when it comes to banks, “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them.” He said there is an “inhibiting impact” on the Obama Justice Department’s willingness to prosecute a bank when bringing a criminal charge "[would] have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Holder’s 2013 comments were foreshadowed by a 1999 memo he wrote as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration. In it, Holder recommended that prosecutors consider “[c]ollateral consequences, including disproportionate harm to shareholders and employees not proven personally culpable” before attempting to convict corporations for wrongdoing.
In May, the House Financial Services Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department about the policy. A press release from committee chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, asserted that the Obama administration was “stonewalling” in providing more details about “whether decisions are being made to prosecute or not prosecute financial institutions based upon their size.”
Prior to serving in the Obama Justice Department, both Breuer and Holder worked at white-collar defense firm Covington & Burling. Both of them went back to work for the firm again immediately after leaving their government posts.
For his part, Holder has recently defended the administration’s record of not prosecuting any individual financial executive involved in the financial crisis. He says the fines the administration has assessed against financial institutions were effective.
“People tend to undervalue what we did with the banks,” Holder told the Financial Times. “Given the nature of the penalties that were extracted, given the interactions that we had with people at the banks, with those attorneys who represented the banks, I think the cultures have changed.”
Left unexplained is how those cultures have supposedly changed when many of the same individuals who were involved in the financial crisis have managed to avoid any punishment.
David Sirota is the author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter@davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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interview with Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi talked about former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rejoining his old law firm whose clients include many of the banks linked to the finanicial crisis. Taibbi described the move as probably the biggest single example of the revolving door. "He spent six years essentially guiding all of these Wall Street firms," he said, "which many of them are clients of this company that he’s now working for—he guided them all back to profitability. He allowed bankers to escape prosecution. And now he’s going right back to that firm, where he’s going to enjoy a very lucrative partnership, whether he ever works again, you know, for the rest of his life."
Below is an interview with Taibbi, followed by a transcript:
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the latest sign of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Recently retired U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is returning home—to the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where he worked for eight years before becoming head of the Justice Department. During his time at Covington, Holder’s clients included UBS and the fruit giant Chiquita. The law firm’s client list has included many of the big banks that the Justice Department under Holder’s leadership failed to criminally prosecute for their role in the financial crisis, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
AMY GOODMAN: In a new interview with The National Law Journal, Eric Holder said his, quote, "appropriately aggressive," unquote, challenges to financial and corporate fraud could mean certain institutions "might not want to work with me," he said, "and ... that’s fine," unquote. However, in 2013, Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and suggested some banks are too big to jail.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. Again, I’m not talking about HSBC; this is just a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence—impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine, who writes about Eric Holder’s time at Covington & Burling and much more in his book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, which is now out in paperback.
AMY GOODMAN: So you were tweeting up a storm yesterday as this news came of the former attorney general, Eric Holder, going back to Covington & Burling. Talk about the significance of this.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably the single biggest example of the revolving door that we’ve ever had. And we’ve had some whoppers in our past. I think previously the worst one was probably Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin leaving Congress and taking a $2-million-a-year job with PhRMA, right after he helped pass the prescription drug benefit bill. But what Holder just did just blows Tauzin away. I mean, he spent six years essentially guiding all of these Wall Street firms, which many of them are clients of this company that he’s now working for—he guided them all back to profitability. He allowed bankers to escape prosecution. And now he’s going right back to that firm, where he’s going to enjoy a very lucrative partnership, whether he ever works again, you know, for the rest of his life.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Holder also sort of became a point person for these, quote, "extrajudicial settlements."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you explain what those are and how they worked?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, Holder, in general, pioneered a number of different ways that essentially a lot of these too-big-to-fail companies were allowed to buy their way out of trouble. And one of the most notorious, I think, was that he concluded a number of the biggest settlement deals with banks like JPMorgan Chase in ways that were not reviewed by a judge. Because we did have some instances during this time period where pesky judges—I think one of the most infamous, in the eyes of Wall Street, was Jed Rakoff, who threw out a settlement with Citigroup because he thought it wasn’t harsh enough—well, to fix that problem, Holder just started striking deals and not submitting them for judicial review. So he did a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase where no judge signed off on the deal. The whole thing was done in secret. He essentially institutionalized the back room. This was just a deal where a bunch of bankers got together with a bunch of Justice Department officials, money changed hands, and that was it. The whole—all of their criminal problems went away. This is a very different way of doing business than what we’ve ever seen before, and it’s very dangerous, I think.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And he also took the term "collateral damage" into the financial world out of the military world, didn’t he, as well?
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah. He actually predated the collateral damage idea back when he was a lawyer in the Clinton Justice Department. He wrote a memo that—you know, it’s now known as the Holder Memo, where he outlined a policy that is called "collateral consequences," and basically all this says is that if you’re a prosecutor and you’re worried about prosecuting a company that employs a lot of people and you’re concerned that innocent people might suffer as the result of a prosecution, you may pursue noncriminal remedies when you go after this company.
The problem was that when—by the time he became attorney general, the economic landscape was dotted all over with these enormous, too-big-to-fail companies, and there was a real threat that if you prosecuted these firms, that it might cause serious damage to the overall economy. Obviously we saw what happened with Lehman Brothers, for instance. So this became sort of the unofficial policy of the United States. We started taking companies that had done very bad things—you know, HSBC is probably the biggest example, laundering money for drug dealers—and instead of throwing people in jail and extracting huge individual penalties from the guilty parties, we just got the banks to pony up a big fine that shareholders paid, and they got to stay in business.
AMY GOODMAN: As you were tweeting your criticism yesterday, a lot of Obama supporters were also on social media pushing the line that Holder did not send anyone to jail because there were no laws broken.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah, and this is—this comes, I think, directly from something that Barack Obama himself said on 60 Minutes once. He said some of the worst behavior on Wall Street was not illegal, some of the least ethical behavior was not illegal. But he crafted that phrase very carefully. He didn’t say all of it was not illegal. He said some of the worst behavior, and that’s true. But some of it was very illegal.
And again, just to go back to some of the worst cases, HSBC admitted to laundering $880 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, including the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is infamous all over the world for these torture videos. So, we have HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, is washing hundreds of millions of dollars for people who chop people’s heads off with chainsaws. That’s a crime. I mean, there’s no—that’s the worst crime that a bank can possibly commit. And anybody who thinks that Holder didn’t send people to jail because they didn’t commit crimes is not really paying attention to what went on during this time.
AMY GOODMAN: Also at Covington & Burling, Eric Holder will be reunited with Lanny Breuer. Explain who he was and the significance of them together.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Lanny Breuerworked at Covington & Burling along with Eric Holder. He went to Holder to become his deputy for the early part of his tenure as attorney general. He was the head of the Criminal Division. Lanny, from the sources that I spoke to while I was researching all this material, was terrified of going to court when he didn’t have an absolute, guaranteed, sure victory. And so, what happened very early in their tenure together was that they did take one case to trial. They went to trial against a pair of guys from Bear Stearns who were accused of defrauding their clients. And they lost. It ended in an acquittal, even though they had very solid documentary evidence. From that point forward, they didn’t take anybody to court. And all of these cases involving all of these banks, they went the settlement route instead, presumably because they were afraid of going into a courtroom. They were worried that juries didn’t understand this material. They were worried that it was too complicated. And so, rather than risk losing and getting a bad headline, they let off all of these people who had done very, very bad things, and so we have this legacy of cash instead of punishment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk also about how the Justice Department and other regulatory groups have changed the composition of the staffing, the high-level staffing, of these agencies during this period when Holder has been there?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. This is something that I heard over and over again over the years, which is that a certain kind of person who used to work in the regulatory agencies, you know, who was a kind of a career civil servant, particularly the law enforcement types, the people who grew up through the ranks, you know, just trying to get the criminal at all costs—they’re primarily motivated by trying to extract justice from wrongdoers—that kind of person is gradually disappearing from the ranks of the regulatory bodies, and they are being replaced, increasingly, particularly at the higher levels, by people from the corporate defense community. And Holder was very profoundly a symbol of that kind of person.
And the difference was, when you have people who come from the corporate defense world, like Holder, like Lanny Breuer, they tend to approach these settlements not to get a pound of flesh out of the wrongdoers, but instead they want to emerge with a settlement that leaves everybody happy when they walk out of the room. But that’s really not a good approach to fighting crime. That’s not the kind of attitude you want in your top crime fighter in the country. And as a result, that’s how we got so many of these settlements, which, again, were concluded in secret, in the back room. And people like Jamie Dimon were walking out of these settlements, saying, "Well, this wasn’t so bad." And their share price would go up the day after these settlements were concluded. That’s really not what we want from the top cop in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: And this goes to the central theme of your book, Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. I mean, Attorney General Eric Holder was hailed as a great civil rights hero. After Ferguson, he actually went to Ferguson. I was in the Selma church on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march just a few months ago, when he gave a powerful speech about young black men—his own son, Eric Holder III, in the front row—being killed, and kept repeating that. It reminds me of Reverend Barber in North Carolina, head of the NAACP, who, after Dylann Roof was arrested, the alleged shooter in the Charleston church, said, "The perpetrator has been arrested, but the killer is still at large." And he was talking, overall, about the system, beyond the Confederate flag, what it represents—for example, mass incarceration—and how these things have to change.
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what this means—on the one hand, a civil rights crusader, but when it comes to issues of who gets put in prison and who remains free, where Eric Holder has stood.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Eric Holder, you know, has talked a lot about reform of prison sentencing, and according to their statistics, incarceration has actually declined under the Obama administration for the first time in I don’t know how many years—forever. But still we have these enormous problems, like the story that you reported on in the beginning of this show. You have people who are in jail for not just for months, but years at a time, awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail. We have millions of people behind bars for crimes that are far less serious than what HSBC, for instance, was doing. And there’s this enormous dichotomy.
I think, you know, this is the—the chief problem with what Holder did is that there are all of these people who are in jail for crimes because it’s easy to put away people who don’t have enough money to defend themselves, who can’t pay enormous fines. Those are the people who end up going behind bars for crimes like money laundering or drug dealing or whatever it is. But we have this rationale for companies like HSBC or JPMorgan Chase or Credit Suisse or BNP Paribas, that are caught with doing tax evasion or money laundering or fraud or whatever it is, that somehow this class of defendants, we can allow them to pay their way out of trouble, while this other group of people has to go behind bars. And we just can’t have that. I mean, that system is totally inappropriate. And as much as Holder wants to hold himself out as a civil rights leader, and has done some good things, this dichotomy is really his legacy, and that’s an enormous problem.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the issue of him returning to Covington & Burling, could you talk about that particular law firm, its role in the Washington scene? And also, what are the limitations on appointed officials, in terms of once they leave office what they can or can’t do, or did the Obama administration institute particular restrictions on their appointees?
MATT TAIBBI: They did. There is a two-year cooling-off period, they call it, where, you know, someone who leaves the Justice Department has to wait for two years before they can interact with the Justice Department again. This means that even though Eric Holder has gone back to work, he has to sit for 19 months during this cooling-off period and do I don’t know what. I’m sure he’s going to be compensated very handsomely during that time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But he can advise the lawyers that do the direct interaction.
MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, yeah. They’ll figure out some way to do it so that it’s, you know, superficially legal. But there is this cooling-off period. Covington & Burling, what its significance is, it’s one of the biggest white-collar defense firms in America. It is notable because it has such a lengthy list of too-big-to-fail banks among its clientele. It also, very interestingly, played a very important role in helping to create the subprime mortgage crisis, because it represented a company called MERS, which was the electronic mortgage registry system, which helped create a lot of the confusion and chaos in the paperwork area of the mortgage system. All these people who were trying to find out who owns their home and can’t find the note, a lot of that is chalked up to the work that MERS did to eliminate paper mortgages. So they had an enormous role in helping create this subprime mortgage market. And then, of course, Eric Holder goes, and he’s the regulator for all that activity, you know, as the attorney general. It was a little weird, to say the least.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Keir Gumbs?
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AMY GOODMAN: —the man that Senator Warren has been protesting, would be put—
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MATT TAIBBI: Right, who’s going to be—who’s going to be on the SEC now, yeah. I mean, this is a—they’re putting him—he’s going to be an SEC commissioner, presumably. Covington & Burling is becoming essentially a kind of shadow Justice Department now. We have six alums from the Justice Department who have just returned to Covington & Burling, and now Covington & Burling is sending another person to occupy a very high-ranking seat in the SEC. You know, it’s problematic, clearly, when you have so many people from the same firm who are all going to be talking to each other. It’s kind of this secondary club. And what happens when all these people have this congenial relationship, they end up making deals that are much more favorable to their clients than they would be otherwise.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, they can all regulate all of the Goldman Sachs alums that are in other agencies in the federal government.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the significance of Gumbs, yes, coming from Covington & Burling, but also representing American Petroleum, he and colleagues at the firm writing a guide advising corporations on how to avoid disclosing their political spending to shareholders, Senator Warren wanting the SEC to require companies to disclose that kind of spending. And the question is: Will President Obama respond to Senator Warren’s pressure?
MATT TAIBBI: Probably not, I’m guessing. You know, I mean, but this—it says a lot that this is the kind of person that they’re going to be bringing in to the SEC. And I think, you know, again, people want a different kind of person occupying these regulatory positions. They don’t want a corporate defense attorney who’s just spent however many years telling companies how to avoid punishment, how to avoid taxes, how to avoid all these problems. You know, I personally would much prefer to have a career investigator, career law enforcement official in that job.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, now out in paperback.
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