TrumanTown | Date: Friday, 2014/07/25, 2:34 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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DOJ Trains AUSAs to Chase Mice While Lions Roam the Campsite Posted on July 21, 2014 by William Black
By William K. Black
In researching my series of articles on the critical omissions in Attorney General Eric Holder’s press release about the settlement with Citi I realized that I need to write multiple articles about the destructive role played by Benjamin Wagner. Holder made Wagner DOJ’s leader on mortgage fraud because Wagner was so willing to propagate the single most absurd, destructive, but so very useful (to the administration and the banksters) lie about mortgage fraud.
“Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”
This column addresses a single article Wagner’s shop published in a journal volume entitled “Mortgage Fraud” to train Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) on how to investigate and prosecute mortgage fraud. 32 UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS’ BULLETIN MAY 2010. The title of the article is “Finding the Smoking Gun,” and the author is Barbara E. Nelan, Assistant United States Attorney, Northern District of Georgia.
This article exemplifies three decisive DOJ failures led by Wagner. AUSAs were trained by Wagner to believe three lies: The “bank,” by which he really meant the bank CEO, was always the victim of mortgage fraud and never the leader of those frauds Banking regulatory agencies had no meaningful role to play in detecting, investigating, and aiding the prosecution of frauds that was worth mentioning in the training, and Whistleblowers had no meaningful role to play in detecting and aiding the prosecution of frauds that was worth mentioning in the training
Those three lies guaranteed de facto immunity for the senior bank officers who led the three most destructive financial fraud epidemics in history. Wagner has defined out of existence the three financial fraud epidemics that drove our crisis, trivialized the critical need to restore the criminal referral process at the banking regulatory agencies, and failed to train AUSAs to understand the critical need to have whistleblowers come forward – particularly given the destruction of the criminal referral process at the banking regulatory agencies.
As I will explain in a future installment, DOJ’s cases against the three largest U.S. banks that it has settled with or is about to settle with were largely handed to DOJ by whistleblowers. I have noted the shameful and self-destructive (if the goal of the administration were to prosecute elite banksters) approach of Holder and DOJ to these whistleblowers – they refuse to even praise their service to the Nation. President Obama and Holder should, in February 2009, have made a national call for thousands of whistleblowers to come forward with information about the elite banksters whose frauds even Holder now admits were “mightily” to blame for the crisis. No one not employed by the administration believes that the administration wants to prosecute the elite banksters who grew wealthy by leading the record fraud epidemics that caused the crisis.
READ FULL ARTICLE
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