Tag Archives: lanny breuer

President Obama Fateful Error in Making Bush’s Goldman Sachs/AIG Scandal His Scandal

By William K. Black
Quito: June 3, 2015

We have known from the beginning that Lanny Breuer, who the Obama administration chose as its head of the Criminal Division in order to ensure that there would be no prosecutions of the banksters that led, and were enriched by the fraud epidemics that drove the crisis, would be a national embarrassment. Readers may recall that Breuer publicly admitted that what caused him to lose sleep was not the world’s most destructive fraud epidemics that ruined our economy or his grant of effective immunity to the banksters who led and became wealthy through those frauds. He lost sleep solely over his fear that if he held them accountable for the frauds that had bankrupted their corrupt banks those banks might be placed in receivership and honest managers appointed. (Of course, that isn’t how he phrased it, but that is what he was actually saying.)

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Lanny Breuer’s Defense of Not Prosecuting HSBC and its Officers

By William K. Black
Quito: April 19, 2015

I have been researching the HSBC frauds for a column I am doing about Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney who refused to prosecute HSBC or any of its officers for the largest and most destructive money laundering and anti-terror finance sanctions-busting in history and continues to fail to do so even though her own appointed monitor at HSBC reports that HSBC is not complying with the sweetheart deal Lynch gifted them and even though she is now aware (of something she should have been well aware of for years) that senior HSBC officials continued to violate the laws to aid the wealthy and criminal evade taxes while HSBC’s lawyers were negotiating the sweetheart deal with Lynch about other mass felonies.  That research caused me to reexamine Lanny Breuer’s statements at the press conference celebrating the great Department of Justice (DOJ) “victory” in failing to hold any HSBC officer or employee accountable and for the anti-regulators acting to ensure that the bank was not held accountable for those crimes in any meaningful fashion.

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