Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Martin Smith, Frontline Producer
The Untouchables, which aired last evening on the PBS program “Frontline,” builds on the outstanding 2012 series co-produced by Martin Smith and his wife, Marcela Gaviria, Money, Power, and Wall Street. (I highly recommend watching all four episodes of the earlier documentary, then rewatching The Untouchables if you want an epiphany into why Wall Street can’t be tamed.) Smith is producer, writer and correspondent in the latest effort.
Unfortunately, last night’s program sought an answer to an abbreviated question: why has no Wall Street executive been criminally prosecuted for fraud tied to the sale of mortgages. The unabbreviated question and the one that infuriates Americans is: why has no executive of a major Wall Street firm been criminally prosecuted for anything.
If the U.S. Justice Department was serious about doing its job, it has a cornucopia of crimes to pick from: Wall Street CEOs and CFOs attesting to fraudulent financial filings with the SEC, money laundering, lying in prospectuses, illegal foreclosures, rigging the Libor interest rate benchmark and then selling interest rate swaps based on a rigged index to school districts, cities and counties across America, manipulating the futures market with a rigged Libor interest rate, and so forth.
By asking the attenuated question, viewers may reach a myopic conclusion: that the head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department, Lanny Breuer, is not prosecuting because he is too afraid of losing cases. A much stronger case can be made that Breuer is too afraid of facing his law partners when his stint is up at DOJ and he returns to his high paying job at the law firm of Covington & Burling — which represents Wall Street’s denizens of casino capital.
Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, and Dan Suleiman, deputy chief of staff and counselor to Lanny Breuer, all hail from the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling. Their former partner at the firm, John Dugan, a former bank lobbyist, headed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates all national banks, from August 4, 2005 through August 14, 2010 – the years leading up to and including the financial crisis.
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