Elizabeth Warren wants answers
The Massachusetts senator is asking the FBI to explain the investigation of the banks like they did with Hillary Clinton's emails.
Elizabeth Warren is still wondering why federal officials haven’t sent any bankers to jail following the 2008 financial crisis.
The Massachusetts senator spent Thursday making the case why the FBI should explain themselves—just like they did during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
After the officials cleared Clinton of criminal wrongdoing back in July, the FBI took an “unusual step” earlier this month and released a 58-page report on their investigation, including 11 pages of notes from their interview with the secretary of state.
And that was after FBI Director James Comey walked the public through the investigation and why no charges were being filed. Comey explained the typically tight-lipped department’s “unusual transparency” was due to the “intense public interest” in the case.
Well, Warren thinks he set a new bar, so to speak. And now she’s bringing to the fore another issue of “intense public interest.”
“Your recent actions with regard to the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provide a clear precedent for a releasing additional information about the investigation of the parties responsible for the financial crisis,” the Democratic senator wrote in a letter Thursday to Comey.
“These new standards present a compelling case for public transparency around the fate of the FCIC referrals,” Warren wrote, referring to 25 criminal referrals (11 individuals and 14 corporations) made by a Justice Department commission set up to investigate the causes of the financial crash.
“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 wrote.
On Thursday, the eighth anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which precipitated the 2008 crisis, Warren also wrote in a separate letter to the Justice Department asking for a new investigation into the response to the FCIC referrals.
In the letter, Warren documented each of the individual criminal referrals against executives and banks, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan.
As she noted, the referrals resulted in zero prosecutions. Five corporations subsequently paid a fine for their actions. Warren says such fines were “small amounts” relative to the companies’ total assets.
“I totally get that it’s not 100 percent,” she said in an interview Thursday on WGBH’s Boston Public Radio. “[A criminal referral] doesn’t mean for sure that there’s been a crime committed and that’s the person who committed the crime. But come on.”
Warren said the financial collapse cost “millions of people their jobs” and an estimated $14 trillion to the economy.
“If you won’t indict people, if you won’t take them to trial, if you won’t hold them personally liable when they break the law, then she just turn around and break it again, and break it again, and break it again,” Warren told BPR.
In her DOJ letter Thursday, Warren called it “an abysmal failure” that the referrals resulted in no charges.
“This failure is outrageous and baffling,” she wrote, “and it requires an explanation.”
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Warren said in an interview she wants the next administration—a Clinton administration, she hopes—to act more aggressively in prosecuting the Wall Street bankers responsible for the financial crisis.
“The public outrage is still there,” she said. “This is about reminding our government officials who they work for.”
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