Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Sally Quillian Yates, Deputy Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice
Two key legal events occurred last week and were reported as separate news items when, in fact, they are highly correlated.
First, the U.S. Justice Department’s Deputy Attorney General, Sally Quillian Yates, released a memo on Wednesday effectively reversing former Attorney General Eric Holder’s standard operating procedure of big money settlements on Wall Street with no individuals being charged. Yates launched the new think in a speech the next day at NYU’s School of Law – not exactly the most auspicious of venues for setting a higher moral tone.
Yates lost much of her credibility in the first five minutes of her talk. First she told the audience that was packed with Wall Street’s white collar defense attorneys that in “the few years since its launch, the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement has made its mark here in New York.”
What has actually made its mark in New York are nonstop crimes and cartel activity on Wall Street culminating in two of the largest banks in America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, admitting to criminal felony charges in May of this year – a first in their more than a century of banking – with more criminal investigations in progress.
More credibility evaporated when Yates attempted to rewrite Eric Holder’s legacy. Yates stated:
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