Was this whistle-blower muzzled? [View all]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/was-this-whistle-blower-muzzled.html

THE fifth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy has occasioned one legacy-spinning defense after another. We’ve heard from Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve; Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary at the time; and Timothy F. Geithner, then the New York Fed president and later Mr. Paulson’s successor at Treasury, about their historic decisions to use trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to bail out the banking system.

But will we ever know what really happened behind all those closed doors? The seemingly appalling treatment afforded Richard M. Bowen III, a former Citigroup executive who blew the whistle on years of malfeasance there, shows that we may not. Thanks to political pressure and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, the events leading up to the financial crisis remain obscured and may never be fully revealed.