Elizabeth Warren: Obama 'Protected Wall Street, Not Families'

On Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) blasted President Barack Obama for protecting big-money crony capitalists on Wall Street, instead of average families on Main Street.

“He picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street,” said Warren in an interview with Salon. “They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. … And it happened over and over and over.”

Warren is hardly the first to highlight Obama’s inaction on prosecuting Wall Street executives.

In May 2012, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer and former Newsweek reporter Peter Boyer put the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute Wall Street executives in the spotlight with their explosive Newsweek article titled “Why Can’t Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice?” The piece revealed that Attorney General Eric Holder and senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials were pursuing a “justice for sale” strategy that sidestepped prosecuting Wall Street executives at large financial institutions who were also clients of Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling.

Shockingly, Schweizer and Boyer revealed that, under Obama and Holder, not “a single criminal charge [has been] filed by the federalgovernment against any top executive of the elite financialinstitutions.” 

By contrast, according to the GAI’s investigative report, “Justice Inaction: The Department of Justice’s Unprecedented Failure to Prosecute Big Finance, between 2002 and 2008, President George W. Bush “obtained over 1,300corporate fraud convictions, including those of over 130 corporate vicepresidents and over 200 CEOs and corporate presidents.” And during theClinton administration’s two terms, the GAI noted that “Clinton’s DOJprosecuted over 1,800 S&L executives, senior officials, anddirectors, and over 1,000 of them were sent to jail.”