Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Change We Can Believe In?
Two stunning assertions came out of the Martin Smith investigative report on Tuesday evening on the PBS program, Frontline. Titled The Untouchables, producer, writer and correspondent Martin Smith interviews Lanny Breuer, the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, who tells Smith he didn’t prosecute any senior executive of the major Wall Street firms because he couldn’t find a criminal case where he could “prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of a crime.”
As the public has watched big money settlements and deferred prosecutions at the largest banks, the public has assumed that every available device of the U.S. Department of Justice — the top law enforcement agency in America – was being deployed to root out and prosecute those who collapsed Wall Street in 2008, costing the U.S. taxpayer trillions in bailouts, the economy trillions in lost jobs and home values, and investors trillions more in stock and bond losses.
But according to two Frontline sources at the Justice Department who worked for Breuer in the criminal division, “when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.”
The obvious question is: if the Justice Department wasn’t using any of the basic law enforcement techniques, how did Breuer know he couldn’t make a criminal case. According to the program’s sources inside the Justice Department, at the weekly indictment approval meetings, “there was no case ever mentioned that was even close to indicting Wall Street for financial crimes.”
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted on July 30, 2002, giving prosecutors the ability to send CEOs and CFOs to prison for falsifying their company’s financial reports. Under the law, executives can face 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. If their conduct can be shown to be willful, the prosecution can obtain up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine.
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