Eric Holder’s Job Prospects Were Too Big to Fail
by Laurence Arnold - July 8, 2015, 10:45 AM EDT
The former attorney general is giving his critics a new round of ammunition by returning to Covington & Burling, whose corporate clientele has included Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.
This is an excerpt from Bloomberg's daily Opening Line column.
The day Eric Holder became U.S. attorney general—Feb. 3, 2009—a front-page story in the New York Times declared, “Wall St., a Financial Epithet, Stirs Outrage and Punch Lines.” Bloomberg headlined a story, “FDIC Boosts Estimate for U.S. Bank Failures Costs.”
Holder had no shortage of “top priorities” during his years at the Justice Department: voting rights, cybersecurity, drug laws. But given what was going on when he took office, he was bound to be measured on how his Justice Department responded to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
He had his moments, including a string of multibillion-dollar penalties against financial institutions that culminated with a $16.7 billion settlement with Bank of America. But as Tom Schoenberg wrote last fall, Holder “spent much of his almost-six-year tenure defending the Justice Department’s record of few Wall Street prosecutions.”
Holder, who left office in April, is giving his critics a new round of ammunition by returning to Covington & Burling, the Washington-based law firm with a corporate clientele that has included Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. ..
Read more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-08/eric-holder-s-job-prospects-were-too-big-to-fail
= new reply since forum marked as read
