Former Attorney General Eric Holder wasn’t out of work for very long. He has now - like so many others who have undermined American democracy in the imperial Washington sewer - passed back through that gold-plated revolving door between government and the private sector. Mr. Holder, who turned over his duties of giving away get out of jail free cards to Wall Street looters to Loretta Lynch in May, has returned to the same white shoe law firm where he worked prior to heading up the Justice Department as the nation's top law enforcement official.
As reported by the website The Intercept in the story “Eric Holder Returns As Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks”:
After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.
The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.
The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.
Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.
The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat,” according to an inspector general report.
The Obama regime has had several of the figures who bailed out the banksters at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer quit their public gigs only to cash in big after a brief period by taking jobs in the same industry - an enormous betrayal of the American people. There was former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who scored two jobs with firms that benefitted from his management of the printing presses.
Helicopter Ben nailed down gigs with bond firm Pimco as well as hedge fund Citadel and his Quantitative Easing programs have inflated the largest stock market bubble in history - one that is inevitably going to burst but probably not until Obama has joined Holder on the golf course. Then there is former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitnher who ended up at private equity firm Warburg Pincus and departed Press Secretary Robert Gibbs who scored a position with McDonalds along with many others of a lesser profile.
The conflict of interest is stunning but predictable for a rat and longtime fixer like Holder. It would have been nice had he at least waited for a few months but the stench of impropriety is so thick in the D.C. air that it isn't even noticed anymore. This is a very serious breach of the public trust for Holder who was in the position to act on behalf of all Americans who got ripped off by these big banks but unethical Eric had all of their backs. With the news that he is officially back on their team now it is pretty evident why there were no meaningful prosecutions of the Wall Street racketeers.
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