Are Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder taking the hit for … Tim Geithner? UPDATED
After reading Ken Houghton’s post immediately below, and then clicking on the Twitter exchange that Ken, Dan and Yves referenced, in which the Frontline reporter, Martin Smith, said he’d received a call from the Justice Department saying that the reporter had come with an agenda and that the Obama Justice Department would not again cooperate with Frontline, I’m wondering whether Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder are taking the hit for … Tim Geithner.
The more I think about it, the more I think that that’s the most likely scenario. It almost seems like Geithner had Obama hypnotized–that he always managed to scare Obama just about to death with “But the banks will COLLAPSE!”
If this is what happened, then whoever at the Justice Dept. who called Smith might actually be hinting that Smith should probe further–say, into the Treasury Dept.–to find the full background.
I mean, how in heaven’s name were those lawyers for the banks and the bankers getting that kind of access to the Justice Dept.’s Criminal Division? How likely is it, really, that this was simply that that asked Breuer or Holder? Or that they even contacted either of them directly? Just a hunch here, obviously, but my guess is: not much.
So maybe Breuer’s the good guy, after all. Maybe he was fighting behind the scenes against acceptance of what was being sold at those presentations. Which would explain the anger of the Justice Dept. person who called Smith.
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UPDATE: In response to reader rjs’s comments in the Comments threat, I responded:
So the answer to the question in the title of this post–”Are Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder taking the hit for Tim Geithner?”–seems to be, no.
seems ive been a few minutes behind you all day beverly…this is a repost of my comment when you asked the same question on the other thread:
no doubt that geithner has always had his banker buddies best interest at heart, beverly, even to the extent of feeding them inside information they could profit off of…but it’s never been geithner’s responsibility to prosecute the banksters for criminal wrongdoing…i cant count the number of times ive seen articles citing a case where covington & burling (holder’s law firm) had taken the side of the banks accused of wrongdoing, and though i cant put my finger on it now, more than once i’ve seen that the connection to holder & breuer is is often mentioned in C&Bs promos to clients…
Maybe I don’t know how to use this computer, but I can’t find anything about Lanny Breuer’s resignation in the NY Times. And there’s little onn the Frontline report beyond a Q & A (via a chat function) conversation with the producer Martin Smith. It’s as if the conversation with Smith were taking place in some college auditorium rather than in a section of the newspaper that claims to be better than all the rest.
The reason that I thought, in reading some of this stuff, that Geithner might have played a role in it is that Geithner is the one who always seemed to have the executives’ backs. Covington & Burling can argue all it wants that huge damage to the economy, and to innocent employees, would result from indictment of the banks themselves, but the banks would not go under if specific INDIVIDUALS were indicted. Covington & Burling represents the banks, not the executives as individuals. So why weren’t any INDIVIDUALS–any EXECUTIVES–indicted?
Breuer says there was no evidence of intent to defraud, but that seems unlikely, unless the DoJ didn’t look for any.
The bottom line is that Breuer and Holder certainly look culpable, and that you’re right, rjs, that Breuer probably was not arguing quietly for indictments against executives. But is that all there is to it?
At least this finally exposes the sickening, sickening symbiotic relationship between the top officials in the DoJ and big-name Washington white collar criminal defense law. And it’s not a good thing for Obama to have renominated Holder as AG.
Jack, the story at the WaPo: Lanny Breuer, Justice Department criminal division chief, is stepping down
from the Frontline transcript, via a secondary source:
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. 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.
doesnt look like he even tried, beverly…
So now we know why there was no evidence of intent to defraud: there was no investigation that could have found any.
But this sort of begs the question of why there was no investigation. Could this really have been simply Breuer’s decision? To not even INVESTIGATE? I dunno.
rjs
Yes, it is clear that smoe major news outlets, including WSJ, reported the story. What the devil are they up to at the Editor’s office of the “newspaper of record”? My perspective has always been that so long as the main stream press is silent on an issue, or worse yet misleading, nothing is going to change. Does the name Judith Miller ring a bell in regards to the ethics of some NY Times staff?
this post from a couple months ago includes a dozen cites and a chart of prosecutions:
Obama Prosecuting Fewer Financial Crimes Than Under Either Bush Presidency: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton Each Prosecuted Financial Crime More Aggressively than Obama
S & L crisis prosecutor Bill Black blames Holder..
Jack, looks like you are onto something;
lambert strether points out that The New York Times would rather cover a Breuer chair than cover Lanny Breuer; he’s got screen shots of unsuccessful searches for any breuer story on several major media sites…
seems like something of a media blackout…
Breuer: “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, one of the largest hedge fund leaders. Now, you’ll say that’s an insider trading case, but it’s clearly going after Wall Street.”
Oh, we get it. It’s a semantics game. Anyone connected with the finance industry will do as a prosecution target, as long as he wasn’t a top executive at a mega bank, a mega investment bank, or a mega mortgage company. He works on Wall Street! We went after Wall Street!
What’s next? A claim that they prosecuted the head of the asphalt company that repaved Wall Street, for tax evasion or something?
BREUER: “First of all, I think that the financial crisis is multifaceted. But even within that, all we can do is look hard at this multifaceted, multipronged problem. And what we’ve had is a multipronged, multifaceted response.”
Actually, there seems to be a major facet missing in their approach. Which was the point of the expose.
All that said, I just think there’s something more that was going on there than just Lanny Breuer’s and Eric Holder’s desire to return to Covington & Burling after their Justice Dept. stints. For one thing, most top white collar crime defense attorneys began their careers as federal prosecutors and made their names in high-profile cases. They know how to defend in white collar criminal cases, precisely because they successfully prosecuted some complicated ones. So prosecuting big-name Wall Street execs would not have hampered their option to return to big-law criminal defense work.
For this reason, I think the criticism of Obama’s selection of Mary Jo White as SEC head is off-base. White was known as an extremely aggressive head of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, and I do think Obama’s decision to nominate her is intended to indicate a toughness toward the finance industry. Yes, she’s been representing finance industry companies and execs in criminal-law matters, but because of that, she now knows all the more how the inside game is played. And the better she is at the SEC job, the more desirable, not the less desirable, she’ll be to the big Wall Street law firms. It’s counterintuitive, and of course exactly the opposite of people who work in regulatory agencies such as the EPA leaving to become lobbyists. But what matters in this situation, less, ideology than actual knowledge.
I just don’t think Holder and Breuer were the ones deciding to not even investigate the big boys. I think that was more likely a policy decision made elsewhere in the administration. But I guess there’s no way for us to know.
i’ll agree that Breuer likely fell on his sword to protect someone higher up, beverly…the 1st thing i thought whan i heard the news of his resignation was “just like oliver north”
Did anyone read Steven Rattner’s Ode to Timothy in the NYTimes today? Gag me.
If Neil Barofsky is to be believed, and I have no reason not to, in “Bail Out”, pages 105-108, he talks about how timid Breuer was in activating the DOJ in at least one case where Barofsky was sure SIGTARP had the goods on the bad guys. So, was Breuer pulling punches on behalf of his master(s)? We may never know, but I am sure glad Geithner has said he doesn’t want to be the next Fed chair.
Oops, here’s the Times link -http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/timothy-geithners-legacy/?hp
Rattner’s column actually discussed only Geithner’s role in the TARP bailout and the immediate aftermath of it, and said Geithner prevented a full-blown depression by saving the financial system. Which is fine, but the problem with Geithner was with the other roles he played as Treasury secretary–especially as a key economic-policy adviser. If I remember right, he reportedly was the one who argued most strongly for a smaller stimulus package–the one that was passed–rather than the larger one that others were pressing for. And there’s also a big question about which of the controversial Dodd-Frank regulations he supported and which ones he opposed.
So Rattner’s column is fine in saying Geithner did a fine job in stabilizing the financial system. And that was crucial. But there were other critical things that he did not perform so well on.
here’s a timmy anecdote, via christie romer…
(at the end of this short video)
this jon stewart video on geithner’s troubles at home is even better…