Eric Holder Needs to Spend More Time with His Family

Or maybe he just needs more money than he’s getting as AG.

(UPDATE:  10/28/14  This article reminded me that Holder once said, "As long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job will go to jail," in answer to a question about the case of New York Times reporter James Risen.  Maybe that gives us another clue as to why he's leaving.)

“I chose him to serve as attorney general because he believes as I do that justice is not just an abstract theory. It’s a living and breathing principle,” Mr. Obama said. He said Mr. Holder used the law to make people’s lives better. “That’s why I made him America’s lawyer, the people’s lawyer.”

  NYT

Whose lives did he make better?  Bankers, yes.  Thousands of poor mortgage holders who got shafted by the bankers?  Sorry.  Apparently, Mr. Obama doesn’t know what the word “justice” means. And neither did Holder.

Eric Holder, the United States’ first black attorney general, will announce later on Thursday that he plans to resign from his post as soon as a successor can be confirmed.

  The Guardian

That shouldn’t take long. Just look under another rock.

The telling sentence in NPR’s report that US attorney general Eric Holder plans to step down once a successor is confirmed came near the end of the story.

“Friends and former colleagues say Holder has made no decisions about his next professional perch,” NPR writes, “but they say it would be no surprise if he returned to the law firm Covington & Burling, where he spent years representing corporate clients.”

A large chunk of Covington & Burling’s corporate clients are mega-banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Lanny Breuer, who ran the criminal division for Holder’s Justice Department, already returned to work there.

[...]

In March, Covington highlighted in marketing materials their award from the trade publication American Lawyer as “Litigation Department of the Year,” touting the law firm’s work in getting clients accused of financial fraud off with slap-on-the-wrist fines.

Covington, American Lawyer says, helps clients “get the best deal they can.”

[...]

[If] you want to understand what [Eric Holder] did for the perpetrators of a cascade of financial fraud that blew up the nation’s economy in 2008, you only have to read that line from his former employer: he helped them “get the best deal they can.”

[...]

By the time the bubble collapsed, the recession hit and Holder took over the Justice Department, Wall Street was a target-rich environment for any federal prosecutor. Physical evidence to an untold number of crimes was available in court filings and county recording offices.

Financial audits revealed large lapses in underwriting standards as early as 2005.

[...]

In 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, giving $165m to the Justice Department to staff the investigations necessary to bring those accountable for the financial crisis to justice.

[...]

Any prosecutor worth his salt could have gone up the chain of command and implicated top banking executives.

[...]

Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal found last week that the Justice Department only collects around 25% of the fines they impose. So the banks may have gotten off even easier.

[...]

And Holder’s Justice Department has been guilty of cooking the books: they admitted last August to overstating the number of criminal financial fraud charges by over 80%.

[...]

More important, the settlements didn’t end the misconduct. Homeowners today continue to lose their homes based on false documents. Because the Justice Department just put a band-aid over the fraud, and didn’t convict any of the ringleaders, the problems went unaddressed, and the root causes never got fixed.

  Guardian

And you don’t believe in conspiracies.

The decision to protect banks instead of homeowners should be laid at the feet of the president and his administration, not one man in the Justice Department. But Holder certainly carried out the policy, even if he didn’t devise it.