"That is not the job of a prosecutor, to worry about the health of the banks, in my opinion. Job of the prosecutors is to prosecute criminal behavior."

"LANNY BREUER: The jobs of tens of thousands of employees can literally be at stake.

NARRATOR: In a September 2012 speech, Lanny Breuer gave a speech explaining his reluctance to indict a major bank.

LANNY BREUER: — the kinds of considerations in white collar cases that literally keep me up at night.

MARTIN SMITH: You gave a speech before the New York Bar Association. And in that speech, you made a reference to losing sleep at night, worrying about what a lawsuit might result in at a large financial institution.

LANNY BREUER: Right.

MARTIN SMITH: Is that really the job of a prosecutor, to worry about anything other than simply pursuing justice?

LANNY BREUER: Well, I think I am pursuing justice. And I think the entire responsibility of the department is to pursue justice. But in any given case, I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.

TED KAUFMAN: That was very disturbing to me, very disturbing. That was never raised at any time during any of our discussions. That is not the job of a prosecutor, to worry about the health of the banks, in my opinion. Job of the prosecutors is to prosecute criminal behavior. It’s not to lie awake at night and kind of decide the future of the banks.

MARTIN SMITH: So is Wall Street breathing a sigh of relief?

DAVID BOIES: I don’t think people are breathing a sigh of relief, given the— the level of other litigation that’s out there. However, I think there are probably a lot of individuals who have breathed sighs of relief over the last two or three years.

NARRATOR: So far, in civil proceedings, the government has levied several billion dollars in penalties for misconduct in a crisis that’s cost investors and homeowners many hundreds of billions of dollars.

But to date, not one senior Wall Street executive has been held criminally liable by the Department of Justice for activities related to the financial crisis."

excerpt - Frontline "The Untouchables"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-...

Tags: bank-fraud-mortgage-fraud, geithner, lanny-breuer, obama

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Permalink Reply by John Russell on January 24, 2013 at 8:13pm

The transcript from the show strongly suggests that the Justice Dept, through the prosecutor assigned to investigate bank fraud during the year proceeding the financial collapse has failed miserably to do it's job.

Lanny Breuer , Chief of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, resigned from his position today, seemingly in the wake of the Frontline program that so strongly criticized his office.

"Well, you've watched Frontline's investigative report "The Untouchables," hereor at PBS's website, or on your local PBS station.

The report cast a sharp glare on the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that Eric Holder's justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable. It revealed Breuer to be an arrogant twit who insisted the DOJ couldn’t prosecute despite a plethora of evidence of crimes presented in the show.

From Frontline's interview with Breuer:

NARRATOR: FRONTLINE spoke to two former high-level Justice Department prosecutors who served in the Criminal Division under Lanny Breuer. In their opinion, Breuer was overly fearful of losing.

MARTIN SMITH: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

LANNY BREUER: Well, I don’t know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you’re talking about.

MARTIN SMITH: These sources said that at the weekly indictment approval meetings that there was no case ever mentioned that was even close to indicting Wall Street for financial crimes.

LANNY BREUER: Well, Martin, if you look at what we and the U.S. attorney community did, I think you have to take a step back. Over the last couple of years, we have convicted Raj Rajaratnam. Now, you’ll say that’s an insider trading case, but it’s clearly going after Wall Street. We—

MARTIN SMITH: But it has nothing to do with the financial crisis, the meltdown, the packaging of bad mortgages that led to the collapse, that led to the recession.

LANNY BREUER: Well, first of all, I think that the financial crisis, Martin, is multi-faceted. And what we’ve had is a multi-pronged, multi-faceted response. And it’s simply a fiction to say that where crimes were committed, we didn’t pursue the cases. And that’s why, where crimes were committed, you have more people in jail today for securities fraud, bank fraud and the like than ever before.

MARTIN SMITH: But no Wall Street executives.

LANNY BREUER: No Wall Street executives.

"More people in jail today for securities fraud, bank fraud and the like than ever before," not true, Mr. Breurer.

In the wake of the savings and loan debacle in the 1980s, special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 ban... Among the best-known: Charles H. Keating Jr., of Lincoln Savings and Loan in Arizona, and David Paul, of Centrust Bank in Florida.

Then, the DOJ threatened Frontline that they would take their cookies and go home, never to cooperate with them again, see the tweets below:

Via Twitter.

Next, this ridiculous piece appeared in the Washington Post announcing Breuer’s imminent departure that paints him as some sort of persecuted white knight:

"A former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Breuer came to the Justice Department well versed in white-collar crime. He has been a driving force behind the prosecution of banks involved in rigging the global interest rate known as Libor.His efforts helped produce a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS and led to criminal indictments against two of the bank’s former traders in December."

In all, not a bad day's work for Martin Smith. But no doubt Breuer's replacement will be another balding guy in a suit just like him."

http://occupyamerica.crooksandliars.com/diane-sweet/doj-s-lanny-bre...

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Permalink Reply by John Russell on January 24, 2013 at 8:14pm

I think this failure is going to be one of the longest lasting stains on the presidency of Barack Obama.

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Permalink Reply by Mike L. on January 24, 2013 at 8:17pm

Well, this reveals the corrupting influence of our inter-connected world of cross-pollinated disciplines.

At it's face, I'd agree that prosecutors should prosecute, and not allow any other influences to cloud their pursuit of the truth, as it pertains to criminal behavior.

However, conversely, I guess if I thought that pursuing a prosecution, was going to result in collapsing the entire financial system in the United States, it would be difficult to proceed with vigor, knowing the ramifications of doing so...

Having said that: It's inexcusable that nobody of prominence has been convicted for causing, or creating the climate which did cause, the largest banking/monetary/economic cataclysm in living memory.

I suspect that the "Elites" that operate on the highest stages and echelons of finance and power, are so entrenched in government and other entities, that they truly are "untouchable".

I fully expect that we will see a larger, less manageable collapse in the near future, and it will not be able to be mitigated, and the entire world will suffer the consequences.

But oh well, sure, millions will starve and die, but the elites will feel no consequence, and for all his "share the wealth" bullshit, Obama is just as guilty, because while he helped write the checks to bail them out, he hasn't done shit to pursue the real problem which persists to this day.

A major collapse is coming, it's just a matter of when.

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Permalink Reply by John Russell on January 24, 2013 at 8:32pm

For all the talk of Obama being a communist and socialist, he has maintained the US Presidents traditional role as water boy for the highest financial interests. The prosecutors explanation it seems to me is that he cannot predict what effect a conviction of a bank president might have? Give me a break. They all took the chance that the public wouldn't demand such prosecutions, and basically they were right. People were more concerned with birth certificates, tea bags, condoms, gay marriage, obamacare, the unemployment rate, etc, to care about justice in what may the worst level of financial crime in American history. I just find it inexplicable.

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Permalink Reply by Mike L. on January 24, 2013 at 8:53pm

People were more concerned with birth certificates, tea bags, condoms, gay marriage, obamacare, the unemployment rate, etc, to care about justice in what may the worst level of financial crime in American history. I just find it inexplicable.

Perhaps "people" were, but that doesn't excuse Obama and Holder from doing nothing at all.

They certainly aren't doing anything right now, nor have they for months, so why are they playing "water boy for the highest financial interests"?

Other than the obvious, which is that they were Obama's biggest contributors.

Additionally, on a social issue level, Obama is a socialist and a communist, but just like in every Commie or Socialist country, that theme only applies to the "people", the little guys, whereas the Elites still gather wealth, and influence, and power.

This goes back to my criticism of the left, that for almost ALL of the shit they routinely lambasted W for, once Obama got in office, they forgot about all those issues, and just fell in line, like lemmings.

Bill Maher echoed this very sentiment just the other night...I'll see if I can find a video of it to post later.