Elizabeth Warren Pushes Back on Bank Prosecution

Ah, Elizabeth Warren - a true hero for the Left! Remember that during a hearing recently she said she worried that "too big to fail had become too big for trial."

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Snark Lane: Elizabeth Warren Shames Bank Regulators

Then last week, Att. General Eric Holder basically confirmed her worst fear by making one of his usual matter-of-fact milquetoast statement that in actuality was a bit scary, explaining why he just couldn't let prosecutors go after Banks that had destroyed our economy and ripped people off for millions of dollars. Well, if he can't do it, who can?

From Huff Post

...Eric Holder made this rather startling confession in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, The Hill reports. It could be a key moment in the debate over whether to do something about the size and complexity of our biggest banks, which have only gotten bigger and more systemically important since the financial crisis.

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy," Holder said, according to The Hill. "And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

Holder's comments don't come as a total surprise. His underlings had already made similar confessions to The New York Times last year, after they declined to prosecute HSBC for flagrant, years-long violations of money-laundering laws, out of fear that doing so would hurt the global economy. Lanny Breuer, formerly in charge of doling out the Justice Department's wrist slaps to banks, told Frontline as much in the documentary "The Untouchables," which aired in January.

Which made Elizabeth Warren came back swinging:

From Talking Points Memo

Warren demanded answers from a panel of federal regulators as to why the multinational bank HSBC got off with a fine for money laundering for Mexican drug cartels — along with violating international sanctions against several countries, including Iran and Libya — when people caught with drugs go to jail for life.

“No one individual went to trial, no individual was banned from banking and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC’s activities here in the United States,” Warren said. “So … what does it take? How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?”

When her questions were repeatedly dodged by Treasury’s overseer of financial crimes David Cohen and Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell, it set her off.

“If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life,” Warren said. “But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night — every single individual associated with this. I just — I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

Oh yeah!!!!!!!!! More of this, please, thanks! <3

Elizabeth Warren Shames Bank Regulators

Senator Elizabeth Warren hit the ground running in her first Banking Committee Hearing. She wasted no time lambasting the spineless regulators who are letting off the big banks with fines and slaps on the wrist instead of taking them to trial. Her goal was to expose the weakness of regulators who see fines as enough penalty for the crimes committed, and she pointed out that when these cases aren't taken to trial then no testimony of wrongdoing is ever put down on the record. So in effect, the bankers get off scott-free without any new information that congress could use to improve the banking system.

Marketwatch

“I want to note that there are district attorneys and U.S. attorneys who are out there everyday squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial to ‘make an example,’ as they put it,” she told bank regulators testifying at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “I am really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.”

. . . Warren acknowledged that trials are expensive but she insisted that if an agency is unwilling to go to trial it is because they are “too timid” or lack resources. She said that the consequence is that if large financial institutions can break the law and “drag in billions” in profits and settle, then they don’t have much incentive to follow the law.

“Every time there is a settlement and not a trial, it means we didn’t have the days and days and days of testimony about what those financial institutions were up to,” Warren said.

Senator Elizabeth Warren at the Feb. 14, 2013 Banking Committee Hearing titled "Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections." The witnesses were: The Honorable Mary Miller, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, U.S. Department of the Treasury; The Honorable Daniel Tarullo, Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; The Honorable Martin Gruenberg, Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; The Honorable Tom Curry, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; The Honorable Richard Cordray, Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; The Honorable Elisse Walter, Chairman, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and The Honorable Gary Gensler, Chairman, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.