Not prosecuting any of the Wall Street criminals was a big failure. [View all]

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One can admire Eric Holder's record on civil rights- it was stellar and still see the terrible job he did regarding these criminal outfits and individuals.

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For many of these settlements, the DOJ didn’t even bring a civil case, as Dean Starkman explained recently in this magazine. “By imposing a fine without documenting the underlying abuses,” he wrote, “the Justice Department has permitted the banks, for a price, to bury their sins.” Even worse, in the majority of these cases, the banks weren’t required to admit to criminal wrongdoing. That policy has finally begun to change, as shown by the BNP Paribas’s guilty plea in June. But it has taken more than five years to reach this point.
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Meanwhile, Holder hasn’t even tried to file criminal cases against major banks. In February 2013, the DOJ settled with HSBC for $2 billion after the bank was caught laundering money for drug cartels and Saudi Arabian banks with ties to terrorist organizations. If there was ever a case that deserved criminal prosecution, this was it. But the DOJ took a pass. Faced with bipartisan criticism from Congress, Holder responded, “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.” That is, the bank was too big to jail. Holder immediately walked back his comments, but that mindset seems to have played a big role in the department’s decision not to prosecute any Wall Street banks for criminal wrongdoing in relation to the financial crisis.

“Holder came into office in the immediate aftermath of a devastating financial crisis caused by an epidemic of corporate crime and wrongdoing,” Robert Weismann, the president of the regulatory watchdog Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday. “Five years later, he has failed utterly to hold the perpetrators of the crisis accountable.”

The DOJ’s prosecution of high-level executives has been even worse than its prosecution of banks. In fact, the department has prosecuted zero executives for those crimes. One way to convict Wall Street executives is to flip low-level bankers, as the DOJ is now doing for crimes manipulating foreign exchange markets. But that tactic has not been used to prosecute crimes after the financial crisis.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119586/eric-holders-legacy-weak-record-prosecuting-wall-street