“Victimless punishment”
by Tom Sullivan
Wall Street might be licking its wounds after yesterday’s hours-long trading shutdown, but for former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder the future is looking rosy.
Holder has gone back to his old D.C. law firm, Covington & Burling, where he can once again work to keep the rich and powerful from facing justice — just what he did for the Obama administration, but with a better pay package. Covington even held an office in its new building for him. Lee Fang wrote on Monday:
Holder’s critics charge that he made a career out of institutionalizing “Too Big to Prosecute” rules within the department. In 1999, as a deputy attorney general, Holder authored a memo arguing that officials should consider the “collateral consequences” when prosecuting corporate crimes. In 2012, Holder’s enforcement chief, Lanny Breuer, admitted during a speech to the New York City Bar Association that the department may go easy on certain corporate criminals if they believe prosecutions may disrupt financial markets or cause layoffs. “In some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor,” Breuer said.
In decamping the DoJ for Covington, Holder reinforces how thoroughly socialized Justice has become around business — in the Grover Norquist sense. But with Justice functioning as a kind of training school, DoJ attorneys with higher-paying aspirations learn more than how not to pee on the office furniture. David Dayen writes:
Holder is at least the sixth former Justice Department official who landed at Covington after leaving law enforcement. In addition to Breuer, Mythili Raman, who also ran the criminal division, went to Covington, as did partner Steven Fagell and special counsels Daniel Suleiman and Aaron Lewis. Holder’s Justice Department appears to have been a farm team for white-collar criminal defense, where the money gets made protecting illicit corporate actors.
Matt Taibbi elaborates:
Holder doesn’t look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.
Taibbi details “five pillars” of that revolution, including failing to win “a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis,” the concept of “collateral consequences” noted above, and ways to soften punishments for financial crimes:
Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You’ve heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.
All of which allowed the big banks to get bigger, their rich executives to get richer, and “Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation.”
Sleazy work if you can get it.