Eric Holder's Best Tricks

Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling.

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Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.

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Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.

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Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.

Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street.

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Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences.

Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling.

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Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences. Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling.

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Holder also pioneered the extrajudicial settlement, striking huge deals with companies in which judges did not sign off on the agreements. [...] This essentially institutionalized the backroom deal. Everything was done in secret, and there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences.

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You might remember the Sinaloa cartel for their ISIS-style, unforgettably upsetting torture videos. HSBC washed their cash. They even created special teller windows to make their deposits easier. This is admitted, not alleged.

But Holder went out of his way to let them keep their U.S. charter. He gave their executives a grand total of zero days in jail, zero dollars in individual fines.

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To reiterate: HSBC laundered money for guys who chop peoples' heads off with chainsaws.

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When asked about this in testimony before the Senate, Holder told elected officials he was concerned harsher penalties against firms like HSBC would "have a negative impact on the national economy."

   Matt Taibbi @ Rolling Stone

Especially the CIA black ops part of it.

The most revolting [Holder invention] in my view was allowing banks like Chase the courtesy of calling their settlements "remedial payments" instead of fines for wrongdoing.

This seemingly insignificant semantic tweak allowed the bank to call $7 billion of their settlement a business expense, which meant they could claim it as a tax deduction, which in turn meant that taxpayers like you and me paid a whopping $2.45 billion of Chase's penalty.

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Holder is a cynic of a type that's increasingly common in Washington.

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In any civilized country, it'd be a scandal. In America, though, he's just another guy selling whatever he can to get by. It was just too bad that what Holder had to sell was the criminal justice system.

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[Holder told] the National Law Journal that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community.

Ha! What community? The community of banksters?  Hasn't he already given them enough?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.