PERIES: Well, Bill, who is likely to be appointed as the attorney general next? BLACK: No one better. ...Eric Holder is reflecting administration policies, and Treasury was far worse than the attorney general. *INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM BLACK* (who SHOULD be Attorney General!) William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of control fraud frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a weapon. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Maes former senior management. SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Mr. Holder signed off on the National Security Agencys authority to sweep up the phone records of millions of Americans not charged with any crime. We remember him for the relentless pursuit of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz. While these whistleblowers were upholding our constitution and the peoples right to know, he was not. He authorized the subpoena directed at journalists and approved the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda, instead of just having him arrested and giving him his day in court. BLACK: Well, hes [Holder] actually going to leave without even a token conviction, or even a token effort at convicting. So, in baseball terms, he struck out every time, batting 0.000, but he actually never took a swing. So he was called out on strikes looking, as we would say in baseball. And I couldnt believe that he would leave without at least having one attempted prosecution against these folks. So he hasnt done the most--he never did the most elementary things required to succeed. He never reestablished the criminal referral process, which is from the banking regulatory agencies, who are the only ones who are going to do widescale criminal referrals against bank CEOs, because, of course, banks wont make criminal referrals against their own CEOs. Holder could have reestablished that criminal referral process in a single email on the first day in office to his counterparts in the banking regulatory agencies, and hes going to leave never having attempted to do so. On top of that, if youre not going to have criminal referrals from the agencies, the only other conceivable way that youre going to learn about elite criminal misconduct of this kind is through whistleblowers. And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistleblowers. What the public doesnt know--and it doesnt know because of Eric Holder--is that in the three biggest cases involving banks--again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis--all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistleblowers. Eric Holder was the czar at the Department of Justice press conferences in each of these three cases, and he and the Justice Department officials, the senior Justice Department officials, at those press conferences, never mentioned the role of the whistleblowers--never praised the whistleblowers and never used those press conferences as a forum for asking whistleblowers to come forward. And so your viewers should take a look at the Frontline special on this, where the Frontline producers made clear that as soon as word got out that they were investigating the area, dozens of whistleblowers came forward, and each of them had the same story: the Department of Justice had never contacted them. So, instead of going after the big guys--by the way, they didnt go after the small CEOs either. I keep talking about elite CEOs, for obvious reasons: they cause far greater damage. But there are all these CEOs of the not very big mortgage banks who are not prestigious, who are not politically powerful, and Eric Holder refused to prosecute them as well. What did he do instead? Well, he prosecuted several hundred mice. And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite. And most disgraceful of all, the official position of the Justice Department and the FBI, as Ive written and quoted from their annual reports on mortgage fraud, is that mortgage fraud is largely supposedly an ethnic crime, with particular disfavored ethnic groups, like Russian Americans. This is (A) not true and (B) an obscenity, for the Department of Justice in particular, which is, after all, charged with preventing this kind of discrimination. Not only is the Justice Department and the FBI spreading this absolute lie about ethnic guilt, but theyre following through, and they are disproportionately prosecuting folks of disfavored minorities. And that is a particular evil and disgusting thing that will be on the tombstone of Eric Holder when historians write about him. ... https://youtube/watch?v=8-8bmPBSnrY
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:52:51 +0000
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