Attorney General Eric Holder will leave a complicated record when it comes to his approach toward Wall Street.
As he prepares to resign, many groups and lawmakers were quick to tout much of Holder’s work over six years as the nation’s top attorney, but several still hold a lingering gripe that he failed to do enough to bring bad actors in the financial sector to justice.
{mosads}Holder was given the job of dispensing justice in the wake of one of the nation’s worst financial crises. And while his agency racked up some of the largest settlements ever against some of the biggest names in finance, he did not bring criminal charges against top executives at many of the institutions that were central to that collapse. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been quick to bring that up repeatedly.
Holder exposed himself to further criticism in 2013, when he suggested at a congressional hearing that it was difficult to bring charges against some large institutions, out of concern that harsh penalties could weigh on the broader economy.
“The size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That remark set off a raft of complaints from lawmakers in both parties that Holder’s Justice Department viewed major banks as “too big to jail.”
As recently as Sept. 9, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the man poised to take over the Senate Banking Committee if Republicans control the chamber, complained to regulators over the lack of bank executive prosecutions.
Warren has long pushed for criminal charges to be brought against bankers, and Shelby singled out the Justice Department as the reason for the inaction.
“Something’s wrong with the Justice Department. People shouldn’t be able to … buy their way out of culpability,” he said. “I agree with [Warren] on that.”
In March, the Justice Department’s Inspector General issued a report that found the agency had repeatedly overstated its efforts to crack down on mortgage fraud, even after the president said in a State of the Union address he was creating a team to focus specifically on that. The report also claimed the department offered up misleading statistics to make the results seem more impressive than reality.
In the wake of his hearing remark and resulting criticism, Holder sought to underline the work the Justice Department was doing to punish financial malfeasance. And in May, he bluntly rebutted those criticisms, saying “There is no such thing as ‘too big to jail.’ ”
While executive prosecutions have been lacking, the Justice Department has reached some of the largest civil settlements in U.S. history with major banks in the wake of the financial collapse.
In August, Bank of America agreed to pay $16.6 billion to settle charges over the role it and its subsidiaries played in packaging and selling risky mortgage securities across the market. That settlement was the largest reached against a single institution in U.S. history.
And just about every other major bank also ended up paying billions to the Justice Department — Citigroup agreed to a $7 billion settlement in July, and JPMorgan struck a $13 billion deal in November that was, at the time, the record-setter.
Holder and Justice Department officials have said investigations into financial fraud are still ongoing, and civil settlements do not preclude additional charges.
Holder reportedly plans to stay on in the position until the Senate confirms his replacement.