William Barr Quotes

Barry Bonds was a star professional baseball player whose accomplishments were aided by taking illegal drugs. He lied about his use of drugs, and the Department made a very large effort over years to finally prosecute him. However during that time there were almost no prosecutions of the thousands of bankers and financiers who had lied, cheated, forged legal documents and in the process almost permanently ruined the American economy—the Great Recession of 2008. The Justice Department claimed that white collar cases are very complex and take longer to prepare prosecutions. Critics claimed that there are so many law breakers, that the government does not want to prosecute all the felons, but just go after a few, and this is easier if time has gone by and public anger has receded or been forgotten.

In the Savings & Loan crises there were under 1000 bankers and others who had committed crimes, In the Meltdown of 2008, there were tens of thousands of criminals. Almost everyone connected with home mortgages broke the law, and all of the major banks in America had officers at the highest levels who committed perjury and fraud regarding foreclosure of mortgages. The biggest fish were involved as well as many thousands of others. Wall Street and the financial industry spend many millions in lobbying and campaign donations to be sure that there would be very few prosecutions and even then no major financial leaders would be called to account in a criminal court. The FBI had identified MILLIONS of cases of perjury and fraud in bank forclosures alone.

Actually a few minor characters were prosecuted for financial crimes committed during that period but none were prosecuted whose behavior caused or accelerated the meltdown, and no bank officers were prosecuted despite the FBI reporting that hundreds of thousands of Mortgage Foreclosure involved perjury by bank officers in a pattern that was used by most of the large major banks. The Obama administration was in the dilemma of either choosing one or two bank officers of whom to make an example or if all those who had committed serious crimes were prosecutors, it would involve thousands of the officers of almost every major bank and tens of thousands of officials and mortgage related firms. These were among the wealthiest and most influential people in the country, and there would be few left to build the American Banking System back up when that was one of our most important national priorities. They were also amongst the largest political contributors to both political parties. So the government bailed the bankers out financially, allowed them to maintain million dollar of more salaries and bonuses, and gave the entire batch of people who broke the law a de facto immunity from criminal prosecution. A further complicating factor was that many of the most egregious, greedy, and publicly harmful were not illegal as a result of much change in the law as a part of financial deregulation or were new schemes that the financial industry had successfully lobbied to prevent regulation as with Derivatives.

The Senator asked Justice Department officials if the reason that there had been no prosecutions of any major financial figures associated with the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession is that they were “too big to jail.” This appears to be the first public official to use this phrase. See {637991} for the Attorney General’s sad but truthful reply.

As this quotation demonstrates, this problem has plagued America for a long time. In terms of crimes committed, for example, General Electric Corporation has committed more crimes than any other criminal enterprise, but it thrives despite this and the penalties are seen as just a slap on the wrist when they do get caught but they do not even get prosecuted for many of their crimes like most large corporations and rich individuals who commit crimes. The people who go to jail are usually the lower level or middle level criminals and the kingpins, the ones with the control and the money, rarely even get prosecuted. In the Great Recession, the largest banks in America committed tens of thousands of serious crimes by forging signatures and making false claims on legal documents. Not a single executive ever went to jail or was even given a suspended sentence. The banks paid small fines.