From the May 6, 2012 Newsweek comes an amazing article about how the Obama Administration is running far below the number of securities fraud investigations of the Bush Administration, or the Clinton Administration--and there are worrisome aspects of the relationships between Eric Holder's old law firm, and the frauds that need investigating:
A year later, in April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin, after a two-year inquiry, issued a fat report detailing several transactions, including Goldman's Abacus deal, that Levin and his staff believed should be investigated by Justice as possible crimes. The subcommittee made a formal referral to the department (as did the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chaired by Phil Angelides), and Levin publicly stated his view that criminal inquiry was warranted. Goldman executives, including the firm's chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.It is well worth reading in full. Even Democrats are disturbed by how corrupt this appears.
Meanwhile, Obama's political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year's scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama's Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.
Justice insists that political operations such as fundraising are kept strictly distanced from the department, in order to avoid even the appearance of political influence. But the attorney general and his team are not unfamiliar with the process; Holder was himself an Obama bundler--a fundraiser who collected large sums from various donors--in 2008, as were several other lawyers who joined him at Justice.
It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made--or received--as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a "bad set of facts."
I presume this link?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html
Cheers
What a dry sense of humour you have Clayton!
ReplyDelete" Even Democrats are disturbed by how corrupt this appears."
I reckon it isn't appearance, it's reality; it's totally corrupt, and they're hardly even covering it up anymore.
Remember in 2008- Obie the Wan had promised to use public funding, until that promise wasn't valid anymore; then it turned out that foreign people could contribute to his campaign using credit cards, and he got millions in fraudulent donations: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-campaigns-massive-credit-card.html
Well, they're doing it again:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/dubious-donations-a-case-study.php
I do appreciate your great point, though- it's amazing that Newsweek is actually mentioning a scandal involving their messiah!
Still, it continually amazes me that the MSM can harp on all manner of trivial idiocy, but totally ignore some of the biggest news stories of our time. How do they justify this? How can they live with themselves, knowing that they're lying by omission?
Never have been able to figure out liberals/progressives/socialists/whatever they're calling themselves today, tho. Probably never will.
--Eskyman
BTW, I found 2-3 of those bogus donations in my smallish home town of 50K, where foreigners had probably mined the previous donor disclosures and added their own in a resident's name, but in odd dollar and cents amounts, a pretty clear sign of currency conversion.
ReplyDeleteBack to the theme of this posting: the "Sage of Omaha" has commented that "It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked." This includes Ponzi schemes: Maddof's failed under the stress of too many redemption demands due to the financial crisis, not anything he was doing.
And, you know, people knew he was illicit, his returns were impossible in several ways, people just thought he was front running customers of his brokerage. If that had been investigated by the SEC the Ponzi scheme would have been found much earlier and with less damage.
Similarly, you know a substantial number of smaller scope frauds have been exposed by the financial crisis and for enforcement actions to go down ... well, there's the principle that "revenge is poor economic policy" (i.e. you don't want to destabilize things further), but....