Eric Holder Targets Banks: 'No Such Thing as Too Big to Jail'

Eric Holder Targets Banks: 'No Such Thing as Too Big to Jail'

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he is willing to punish financial institutions for criminal practices in a video posted to the Justice Department website.

“I intend to reaffirm the principle that no individual or entity that does harm to our economy is ever above the law,” Holder said. “There is no such thing as ‘too big to jail.'”

In 2012, Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer and veteran Fox News journalist Peter Boyer published an explosive Newsweek cover story

The story revealed how Attorney General Eric Holder and the DOJ operate under a “justice for sale” strategy that forgoes criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives at big financial institutions who just so happen to be Obama campaign bundlers or clients of the white-shoe law firms where Holder and his top DOJ lieutenants worked.

Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling, counts among its clients top firms and banks like: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank. 

Equally shocking, Schweizer and Boyer revealed that despite the Obama administration’s Occupy Wall Street-style rhetoric, “there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.” 

As the GAI revealed in its investigative report, “Justice InAction: The Department of Justice’s Unprecedented Failure to Prosecute Big Finance,” between 2002 and 2008, President George W. Bush “obtained over 1,300 corporate fraud convictions, including those of over 130 corporate vice presidents and over 200 CEOs and corporate presidents.” And during the Clinton administration’s two terms, the GAI notes that “Clinton’s DOJ prosecuted over 1,800 S&L executives, senior officials, and directors, and over 1,000 of them were sent to jail.” 

Conservatives have been outraged at Holder and DOJ’s unwillingness to prosecute Obama cronies and bundlers, like disgraced former Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the vaporizing of $1.6 billion of customers’ money at the now-defunct MF Global, whom the GAI revealed was a client of Eric Holder’s law firm Covington & Burling. And progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren have blasted the Obama White House for its refusal to go after wrongdoers. 

In March 2013, Holder said it can “be difficult” to prosecute big banks, because a criminal charge could crater the economy-a comment Holder quickly walked back. Put simply, top banking executives are “too big to jail.”

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