Saturday, August 18, 2012

Did You See The Frontpage NY Times Story on Jon Corzine?

Obama Justice Department Refuses to Charge Large Campaign Donor; Questions Raised About Political Influence

"In a controversial decision which has already raised questions about possible White House political influence, the Justice Department announced today it would not pursue criminal charges against Jon Corzine.  Corzine, a major Obama contributor in 2008 and a contribution "mega-bundler" in this year's campaign, continues to claim he has no knowledge of what happened to the missing $1 billion in MF Global customer funds.  The announcement has already prompted concerns from government ethics public interest groups regarding the Justice Department's handling of a case involving a prominent and wealthy Wall St. supporter of the President, about whom Vice-President Biden said "when we wanted to know how to fix the economy the first person we called was Jon Corzine, and we followed his advice".


Oh, sorry, I just woke up from a dream in which President Obama was a Republican. 

Let me look around - ah, here's the actual NY Times story; took awhile to find as it was in the business section

No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global


A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.
After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.
The hurdles to building a criminal case were always high with MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy in October after a huge bet on European debt unnerved the market. But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives. Just a few individuals — none of them top Wall Street players — have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.


I'm certainly glad they went out of their way to explain just how hard it was to build a criminal case.  They did have one mention of party affiliation further down in the article.  No mention of fund raising or the person in the White House at all.  I'm sure it's in that spirit of fair play where they don't want to unduly influence an ongoing political campaign.  You can read the whole article here.



1 comment:

  1. Welcome to the political race; is it November yet?! dm

    ReplyDelete