This post originally appeared at Common Dreams. In that letter, Warren said she wanted a review of what DOJ actually did with referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
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A formal investigation has been requested by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren into the reasons why no criminal charges were brought against those involved in the global financial crisis of 2008. According to Warren, “Nine individuals were implicated in these referrals (two were implicated twice)”.
“If Clinton’s email server was of sufficient “interest” to establish a new Federal Bureau of Investigation 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 to Comey. Not one of the nine has gone to prison or been convicted of a criminal offense. “Only five of these 14 corporations paid any fine or suffered any additional consequences for their actions”, she writes.
Now, Elizabeth Warren has written an open letter to Comey asking him whether this new era of investigation transparency means that the FBI will explain why the Bureau let all those banksters go free? All of these were tied to specific violations of federal law.
Those named by the FCIC include top executives of some of the largest banks in the country and some of the most politically connected men on Wall Street, including Robert Rubin, former Bill Clinton treasury secretary and Citigroup chairman.
“There’s a clear public interest in finding out why none of these individuals or corporations were held responsible”, she said. “This failure is outrageous and baffling, and it requires an explanation”.
Thursday is the eighth anniversary of Lehman’s bankruptcy, which helped trigger the financial meltdown.
In her letter to Comey, Warren argued that when the FBI Director publicly disclosed information relating to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, an unusual move, he set a “new FBI standard of transparency”.
At the time, Comey said that “making these materials available to the public [was] in the interest of transparency”.
The FCIC’s criminal referrals, which were sent to the Justice Department in October 2010, have never been made public.
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“Your recent actions with regard to the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provide a clear precedent for releasing additional information about the investigation of the parties responsible for the financial crisis”, Warren wrote in a letter expected to be sent today and obtained by Roll Call. “I can think of no matter of “intense public interest” about which “the American people deserve the details” than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash”, she wrote.
