Senator, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey demanding to know why more executives of major banks were not prosecuted after the 2008 financial crisis.
Why Now?
If you’re wondering why Warren has chosen to demand this information now, eight years after the crisis, look no further than the recent news saga on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The FBI has been unusually transparent with its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. The FBI usually does not release the details of an investigation when charges are not filed. Now that the FBI has diverged from that policy, Sen. Warren wants them to apply their new transparency standard to important cases from the past.
In her letter, Warren said,
“If Secretary Clinton’s email server was of sufficient ‘interest’ to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then surely the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to the same level of transparency.”
Warren also sent a letter to Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice. She asked Horowitz to review the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute.
What Happened in 2010?
In case you can’t remember what happened with the investigation of the financial crisis, here’s a summary:
- In 2009, Congress created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) to figure out what had caused the financial crisis.
- In 2010, the FCIC sent the Justice Department a list of individuals or corporations that broke the law, and whose criminal activity directly caused the crisis.
That list of referrals has never been made public, but Warren’s staff figured out which organizations they are by examining documents released by the National Archives in March.
The referrals include major banks like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Lehman Brothers, and other companies such as AIG, Fannie May and Freddie Mac.
The referrals also include individual CEOs of these companies.
Warren wants to know why all of these people and corporations who broke the law and plunged the United States into economic turmoil got away Scott-free. How Comey and Horowitz will respond to her letters is anyone’s guess.
Warren has been on this mission for a while. Here she is asking a similar question 3 years ago:
Featured Image: Screenshot Via YouTube Video.
