May 9, 2012
May 9, 2012. Washington. Wall Street titan Warren Buffett praised both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on the CNBC financial news network yesterday. Giving his personal recommendation to both men, Buffett could find little difference between the two candidates’ policies toward the multinational Wall Street corporations that brought America to its financial knees four years ago. Buffett isn’t the only money magnate rewarding the President for his inaction either. Goldman Sachs, ground zero for the US financial collapse, is Obama’s largest financial contributor. But what do they get from the President in return?
Accusations of protection-for-money are mounting on President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder.
For the millions of Americans who continue to demand justice for the near destruction of their country, the answer to that question is US Attorney General Eric Holder. Just as former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson protected his former coworkers and employer at Goldman Sachs during the 2008-2009 collapse, AG Eric Holder appears to be protecting his former coworkers and employer at the Washington DC law firm of Covington & Burling.
Who are Covington’s and Eric Holder’s clients? None other than the very same multinational financial institutions at the center of the much-documented fraud during the US housing collapse and the ensuing global financial meltdown. Those corporations funneling millions to Eric Holder’s friends and associates include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, and more.
For critics of President Obama and his hands-off policy of policing Wall Street and its massive fraud against the American people, the formula is simple, if not obvious.
Wall Street corporations such as the ones just mentioned funnel millions to the lawyers at Covington & Burling, among other law firms. Covington, according to Newsweek and The Daily Beast, paid Eric Holder over $4.5 million of that money in just two years. Eric Holder, in his capacity as Attorney General, has refused to prosecute one single person responsible for the global fraud and the financial Armageddon that immediately followed.
The Newsweek investigation proposes another simple and obvious formula that may be responsible for keeping the many guilty individuals from being charged and convicted.
In 2009, newly elected President Obama summoned CEO’s of the Wall Street firms most guilty to the White House where he reminded them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” In other words, the American people wanted guilty individuals to go to prison. But as President, Barack Obama had the power to squelch that justice.
What’s happened since that meeting? For starters, President Obama appointed as his top cop a man whose job at the law firm of Covington & Burling was to protect financial criminals. Attorney General Eric Holder, while making a name for himself prosecuting victimized senior citizens, cancer patients and Iraq and Afghan War vets, has brought all criminal prosecutions against Wall Street firms and individuals to a screeching halt. As the report points out, criminal prosecutions of financial fraud by Holder’s DoJ are at a 20-year low. That’s extremely puzzling considering he is charged with prosecuting the most blatant, documented and widespread financial fraud in US history.
The second piece of circumstantial evidence against President Obama is the trail of money. One might wonder why the President warned the guilty bankers that he was the only man that could keep them out of prison back in 2009. That’s not a threat, demand, question or any other obvious communication. Instead, it begs the question…unless?
What happened that satisfied President Obama enough to protect the entire slew of individuals guilty of wrongdoing? Those global financial institutions threatened to cut-off credit to the American people, throw tens of millions of innocent Americans out of their homes and onto the streets, fleece tens of billions of dollars out of states and municipalities, and all but financially carpet-bomb the United States into the monetary stone age. In the end, the banks did all that anyway. So, it’s apparent that President Obama didn’t get a single item he demanded on behalf of the victimized American people.
Money, money, money, money
What did President Obama receive to deny justice for the people? Money, money and more money. Of course, for our legal disclaimer we must remind readers that we have no evidence that the millions of dollars paid to Barack Obama and Eric Holder by those very same Wall Street figures had anything to do with the fact that the two men have refused to bring a single one of them to justice. As the nation’s top law enforcement official Eric Holder would say, the two are simply coincidences.
Most people don’t realize, but Newsweek reminds us, that Attorney General Eric Holder was a ‘financial bundler’ for candidate Barack Obama. A former official in the Clinton Administration, Holder was in the unique position to back-stab candidate Hillary Clinton by stealing her largest financial contributors from the inside of her own inner-circle. Holder went on to act as ‘bag man’ or ‘middle man’ for the Obama fundraising machine. The future Attorney General collected large sums of money from an assortment of individuals, many former contributors to Obama’s opponent Hillary Clinton. Holder’s reward – appointment as US Attorney General.
During the 2008 election, Barack Obama shattered all stereotypes that the Republican Party was the party of Wall Street. The fact in these modern times is that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street, and still to a slightly lesser extent the GOP. When compared side by side, Democrat Obama received almost double the amount of Wall Street money as his Republican opponent John McCain. Goldman Sachs executives alone paid Barack Obama more than $1 million in 2008 alone.
In the Newsweek investigation published by The Daily Beast, the authors argue that even President Obama’s fellow Democrats question the ties between financial payments to President Obama and the lack of any criminal prosecutions on Wall Street. Quoting the Chair of the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Phil Angelides, who also served as California’s Democratic Treasurer, “It’s perplexing at best. It’s deeply troubling at worst.”
Newsweek reminds us that financial fraud prosecutions are currently down 39 percent since 2003 and at a 20-year low under President Obama. The publication sought out another respected Democrat and government regulator who helped clean-up Wall Street in the 1980’s after the criminal ‘S & L scandal’. William Black is now an associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri.
“There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department,” Black told Newsweek, “You need heads on the pike. The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
The authors go on to speculate the drastic differences of positions by 2009’s President Obama, versus 2008’s candidate Obama. The article states, ‘Obama delivered heated rhetoric, but his actions signaled different priorities. Had Obama wanted to strike real fear in the hearts of bankers, he might have appointed former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or some other fire-breather as his attorney general. Instead, he chose Eric Holder.’
The mention of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is interesting. With both Obama and Fitzgerald hailing from Chicago and both men intimately intertwined with the infamous Chicago Democratic Machine, they two are more than familiar with each other. Unfortunately for the American people, Fitzgerald was on the side of justice while Obama was on the side of the Machine.
As this author can attest since Whiteout Press is located in US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s jurisdiction of Northern Illinois, the man is one of the most passionate, proven and successful corruption-busters in the nation. And there was no way on Earth President Obama was going to appoint America’s Justice League superhero as his top cop. Fitzgerald had already prosecuted numerous members of Chicago Mayor Daley’s inner circle, as well as a number of other high-ranking Democrats such as Illinois’ last Governor Rod Blagojevich. He also successfully prosecuted high-ranking Republicans including the Illinois Governor before Blagojevich, George Ryan. Even more impressive, Fitzgerald was the US Attorney that actually had the courage to prosecute the Republican White House in the form of VP Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby.
But President Obama didn’t appoint superhero Patrick Fitzgerald as US Attorney, settling instead for his financial bundler Eric Holder.
As Newsweek and The Daily Beast article details, Eric Holder had a vastly different background in law enforcement. Holder made millions on the other side of the law, defending accused Wall Street criminals. The investigation reports, ‘Eric Holder, a former Clinton Justice official who, after a career in government, joined the Washington office of Covington & Burling, a top-tier law firm with an elite white-collar defense unit. The move to Covington, and back to Justice, is an example of Washington’s revolving-door ritual, which, for Holder, has been lucrative–he pulled in $2.1 million as a Covington partner in 2008, and $2.5 million (including deferred compensation) when he left the firm in 2009.’
In all, 4 well-connected white collar criminal defense attorneys from Covington, including Holder, came to President Obama’s Justice Dept. Immediately under AG Eric Holder, Lanny Breuer was appointed to head the DoJ’s Criminal Division. Breuer also happened to be co-chair of Covington’s elite and high-priced white collar criminal defense unit. Since Obama’s taking office in 2009, at least 2 Covington employees have left the firm, gone to work for Eric Holder’s Justice Dept, and then gone right back to work at Covington again.
In explaining to the American people why he hasn’t brought a single person to justice for the crimes that led to the global financial collapse, Attorney General Eric Holder explained from the steps of Columbia University earlier this year, “We found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible…We have also discovered that some of this behavior, while morally reprehensible, may not necessarily have been criminal.”
The question the American people keep asking is, if only some of the unethical, irresponsible and morally reprehensible conduct was legal, why isn’t he prosecuting the rest of the conduct that was obviously illegal?
For more information regarding AG Eric Holder or the US financial collapse, read any of the following Whiteout Press articles:
House begins Contempt of Congress process for AG Eric Holder
DoJ admits to False Congressional Admissions
Government pockets $5.5 Billion to betray Homeowners
The American Housing Meltdown, How? Why?
What caused America’s Economic Collapse?
Subscribe to Whiteout Press. It’s FREE and you can unsubscribe at any time. Simply submit your email address at the top of the page.
