I definitely didn't see this coming. He's had a pretty rough tenure, but I'd expect him to stay put to finish carrying out Obama's agenda:

Quote:Quote:

Eric Holder Jr., the nation's first black U.S. attorney general, is preparing to announce his resignation Thursday after a tumultuous tenure marked by civil rights advances, national security threats, reforms to the criminal justice system and 5 1/2 years of fights with Republicans in Congress.

Two sources familiar with the decision tell NPR that Holder, 63, intends to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed, a process that could run through 2014 and even into next year. A former U.S. government official says Holder has been increasingly "adamant" about his desire to leave soon for fear that he otherwise could be locked in to stay for much of the rest of President Obama's second term.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014...ey-general

Thoughts?

Something else is going on...wonder what new scandal is about to break?

Must have something to do with the November elections. Or a SCOTUS appointment.

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:43 AM)YossariansRight Wrote:  

Something else is going on...wonder what new scandal is about to break?

Must have something to do with the November elections. Or a SCOTUS appointment.

Good news, unless it is a SCOTUS thing like Ginsburg retiring and him taking her place.

Holder's of the worst AGs ever, down with Palmer, Reno, and Gonzalez. No prosecution of the Wall Street fraudsters that brought down the global economy, but plenty of bullshit news reporter chasing.

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:43 AM)YossariansRight Wrote:  

Something else is going on...wonder what new scandal is about to break?

Must have something to do with the November elections. Or a SCOTUS appointment.

Break? Where does one begin?

Fast and Furious/ATF, Black Panther voter intimidation ("my people"), constantly playing the race card (Trayvon, Detroit Muslims, etc.), pressuring Ferguson police not to release video, etc.

Dude is a racist scumbag. Good riddance.

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:49 AM)Sp5 Wrote:  

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:43 AM)YossariansRight Wrote:  

Something else is going on...wonder what new scandal is about to break?

Must have something to do with the November elections. Or a SCOTUS appointment.

Good news, unless it is a SCOTUS thing like Ginsburg retiring and him taking her place.

Holder's of the worst AGs ever, down with Palmer, Reno, and Gonzalez. No prosecution of the Wall Street fraudsters that brought down the global economy, but plenty of bullshit news reporter chasing.

Ginsburg was the first person I thought of when I read this.

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:49 AM)Sombro Wrote:  

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:43 AM)YossariansRight Wrote:  

Something else is going on...wonder what new scandal is about to break?

Must have something to do with the November elections. Or a SCOTUS appointment.

Break? Where does one begin?

Fast and Furious/ATF, Black Panther voter intimidation ("my people"), constantly playing the race card (Trayvon, Detroit Muslims, etc.), pressuring Ferguson police not to release video, etc.

Dude is a racist scumbag. Good riddance.

This man gets it.

I'm surprsied. He didn't go down after fast and furious, after ignoring the IRS discrimination against conservatives, and bumbling a few other big issues, all the sudden now kind of out of the blue he steps down. Either some new info is comming out about some of his previous mistakes is comming out or they just wanted him to wait to step down because of past mistakes but waited a while to allow him to save face and say he's stepping down to be with his family or something who knows but the timing does seem odd.

They are probably making him step down, to draw away attention from something Obama did. They are ideological allies.

It's because He said something negative about trannys back in 1997

Here is an article that appeared in a news site today. It explains why Eric Holder was a failure as Attorney General.

-------------------------------------------------------


Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In both the U.S. savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and the Enron-era accounting frauds of the early 2000s, there were more than 1,000 successful felony convictions in cases designated as major by the DOJ. In both those fraud epidemics, federal prosecutors prioritized the top executives of the corporations responsible. This context makes Holder’s failure to prosecute — much less convict — the elite bank frauds that caused this far larger crisis all the more damning.

In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history — the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5) failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.

Holder and his defenders will respond to such charges by appealing to the size of the civil settlements the DOJ obtained from the major banks under his tenure. But his case is risible. First, the civil fines, while sounding large, would never be large enough to pose even the slightest risk that the banks’ capital would be impaired, because Holder and White House continue to embrace the too-big-to-fail doctrine, that the responsible banks are too important to the economy to allow the risk of their collapse. Such fines amount to the cost of doing business — a very lucrative one, in fact, for the controlling officers.

‘A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.’
Eric Holder
U.S. attorney general


Second, the CEOs knew that they could trade off a slightly larger fine in return for complete immunity for themselves and other officers who might otherwise be flipped by federal prosecutors to testify against more senior officers. The fines, of course, would be paid not by the CEOs but by the banks they ran. Indeed, one of the lesser-known aspects of the crisis is that the DOJ almost never sued a banker (as opposed to a bank) and virtually never sought to claw back bankers’ fraud proceeds. It is telling that, as even Holder admitted last week, “A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.”

Despite my grave misgivings, I proved too optimistic about Holder. I always thought he would prosecute at least one of the top bankers from the most infamous fraudulent lenders such as Citigroup, Countrywide, Ameriquest or Washington Mutual as a token legacy case. No, Holder refused to indict even one of them for leading any of the megabanks that engaged in fraudulent conduct that devastated the world economy. This is all well known, as I and other observers have explained repeatedly. What is not as well known, however, is that Holder refused to indict even non-elite financial CEOs, for example, at midsize mortgage banks that specialized in making fraudulent loans. Instead, he prosecuted hundreds of bit players and spread the disgraceful double lie that mortgage fraud was largely an ethnic crime that was committed almost exclusively by primarily ethnic borrowers rather than the officers controlling the lenders. Holder’s legacy in this sphere is that he was the one chasing black, brown and Russian-American mice while white lions roamed free.

Holder did not simply fail. He didn’t even try. He announced last week at his speech at New York University — more than five years into his term, at a point when the statute of limitations has run or is about to run out — that the law is inadequate to prosecute and that we need stronger whistleblower incentives. The claim is absurd: The DOJ cases against Bank of America, Citi and JPMorgan were all made possible by whistleblowers. Holder himself was featured in the DOJ press conferences on each settlement. Neither Holder nor any DOJ official speaking at those press conferences mentioned that the cases were the fruits of disclosures by whistleblowers, praised the whistleblowers or called for other whistleblowers to come forward. In a proper world, Holder would have stood next to the whistleblowers at those press conferences and President Barack Obama would have awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. In the world in which we live, Holder and Obama have led an extraordinary effort to crack down on whistleblowers.

The most basic requirement for success in prosecutions of elite bankers was the restoration of the criminal referral process by the federal banking regulatory agencies, which was terminated under President George W. Bush. If he wished, Holder could have gotten that process recreated with one email to each of the banking regulatory agencies. Instead, we have heard nearly six years of excuses for why it is so difficult to prosecute elite frauds. I am reminded of the Barbie doll that was mocked because it whined “Math class is tough.” The difference: The Barbie doll that said that was removed from the market within weeks, while Holder whined for five-plus years and kept his job.

.

Al Sharpton Wants to Help Crown Eric Holder’s Successor

Rev. Al Sharpton said today that he is in “immediate conversations” with the White House about crowning a successor to Attorney General Eric Holder, the nation’s first African-American attorney general.

“We are proud that he has been the best Attorney General on civil rights in U.S. history and disappointed because he leaves at a critical time when we need his continued diligence most,” Mr. Sharpton, the president of the National Action Network, said in a statement. “We are engaged in immediate conversations with the White House on deliberations over a successor whom we hope will continue in the general direction of Attorney General Holder.”

Mr. Sharpton, who is close to President Barack Obama, heaped praised Mr. Holder, a Democrat who spoke openly about race relations in America. The Justice Department announced this afternoon Mr. Holder will voluntarily resign his post.

“His accomplishments in working to protect American’s from terrorism, fighting to protect voter rights, challenging unfair sentencing, directing U.S. attorneys on fair prosecution, and being the only Attorney General to visit the site of a civil rights complaint in Ferguson must be noted in American history,” Mr. Sharpton continued.



Read more at http://observer.com/2014/09/al-sharpton-...z3ESURgrXw
Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook

Maybe he was getting tired of the small civil-servant salary and didn't wanna wait for that Wall Street payoff? Expect to see him take up a very well compensated position as a "strategic consultant" to GS or the like in the not too distant future.

For all the claims that he is a racist, the guy looks about 80% Caucasian. Definitely more white than black.

Quote: (09-26-2014 07:42 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

For all the claims that he is a racist, the guy looks about 80% Caucasian. Definitely more white than black.

Damn, if he's 80% white, then what am I?

#identitycrisis

Quote: (09-26-2014 03:46 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

Here is an article that appeared in a news site today. It explains why Eric Holder was a failure as Attorney General.

-------------------------------------------------------


Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In both the U.S. savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and the Enron-era accounting frauds of the early 2000s, there were more than 1,000 successful felony convictions in cases designated as major by the DOJ. In both those fraud epidemics, federal prosecutors prioritized the top executives of the corporations responsible. This context makes Holder’s failure to prosecute — much less convict — the elite bank frauds that caused this far larger crisis all the more damning.

In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history — the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5) failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.

Holder and his defenders will respond to such charges by appealing to the size of the civil settlements the DOJ obtained from the major banks under his tenure. But his case is risible. First, the civil fines, while sounding large, would never be large enough to pose even the slightest risk that the banks’ capital would be impaired, because Holder and White House continue to embrace the too-big-to-fail doctrine, that the responsible banks are too important to the economy to allow the risk of their collapse. Such fines amount to the cost of doing business — a very lucrative one, in fact, for the controlling officers.

‘A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.’
Eric Holder
U.S. attorney general


Second, the CEOs knew that they could trade off a slightly larger fine in return for complete immunity for themselves and other officers who might otherwise be flipped by federal prosecutors to testify against more senior officers. The fines, of course, would be paid not by the CEOs but by the banks they ran. Indeed, one of the lesser-known aspects of the crisis is that the DOJ almost never sued a banker (as opposed to a bank) and virtually never sought to claw back bankers’ fraud proceeds. It is telling that, as even Holder admitted last week, “A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.”

Despite my grave misgivings, I proved too optimistic about Holder. I always thought he would prosecute at least one of the top bankers from the most infamous fraudulent lenders such as Citigroup, Countrywide, Ameriquest or Washington Mutual as a token legacy case. No, Holder refused to indict even one of them for leading any of the megabanks that engaged in fraudulent conduct that devastated the world economy. This is all well known, as I and other observers have explained repeatedly. What is not as well known, however, is that Holder refused to indict even non-elite financial CEOs, for example, at midsize mortgage banks that specialized in making fraudulent loans. Instead, he prosecuted hundreds of bit players and spread the disgraceful double lie that mortgage fraud was largely an ethnic crime that was committed almost exclusively by primarily ethnic borrowers rather than the officers controlling the lenders. Holder’s legacy in this sphere is that he was the one chasing black, brown and Russian-American mice while white lions roamed free.

Holder did not simply fail. He didn’t even try. He announced last week at his speech at New York University — more than five years into his term, at a point when the statute of limitations has run or is about to run out — that the law is inadequate to prosecute and that we need stronger whistleblower incentives. The claim is absurd: The DOJ cases against Bank of America, Citi and JPMorgan were all made possible by whistleblowers. Holder himself was featured in the DOJ press conferences on each settlement. Neither Holder nor any DOJ official speaking at those press conferences mentioned that the cases were the fruits of disclosures by whistleblowers, praised the whistleblowers or called for other whistleblowers to come forward. In a proper world, Holder would have stood next to the whistleblowers at those press conferences and President Barack Obama would have awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. In the world in which we live, Holder and Obama have led an extraordinary effort to crack down on whistleblowers.

The most basic requirement for success in prosecutions of elite bankers was the restoration of the criminal referral process by the federal banking regulatory agencies, which was terminated under President George W. Bush. If he wished, Holder could have gotten that process recreated with one email to each of the banking regulatory agencies. Instead, we have heard nearly six years of excuses for why it is so difficult to prosecute elite frauds. I am reminded of the Barbie doll that was mocked because it whined “Math class is tough.” The difference: The Barbie doll that said that was removed from the market within weeks, while Holder whined for five-plus years and kept his job.

This is what makes me think that Obama is a total fraud and the Manchurian Candidate of Wall Street.

I spent years defending: 1. guys who were arrested for selling grilled sausages on the street without a license, 2. people who bounced a check at Macy's, 3. crack whores, 4. guys with four joints charged with "possession with intent to distribute in a school zone," 5. sports ticket scalpers, 6. junkies and addicts of all types, 7. guys arrested for pissing in an alley charged with indecent exposure, 8. several score bogus domestic violence and rape charges.

In all but a few cases, the prosecutors dug in an insisted on the harshest penalties they could get. Judges would lecture about "personal responsibility." Even obviously bogus charges were followed until I defeated them by motion or trial.

Yet these obvious frauds in the mortgage securitization and marketing - the origination of the loans, the ratings of the debt securities, the false statements made in the selling of the securities, the bets the bankers made against their own products - were "too complicated" and the defendants "too big."

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:49 AM)Sp5 Wrote:  

Quote: (09-25-2014 10:43 AM)YossariansRight Wrote:  

No prosecution of the Wall Street fraudsters that brought down the global economy, but plenty of bullshit news reporter chasing.

This can't be repeated long or loud enough.

50 years ago there would have been open revolt.

Quote: (09-27-2014 09:20 AM)Sp5 Wrote:  

I spent years defending: 1. guys who were arrested for selling grilled sausages on the street without a license, 2. people who bounced a check at Macy's, 3. crack whores, 4. guys with four joints charged with "possession with intent to distribute in a school zone," 5. sports ticket scalpers, 6. junkies and addicts of all types, 7. guys arrested for pissing in an alley charged with indecent exposure, 8. several score bogus domestic violence and rape charges.

In all but a few cases, the prosecutors dug in an insisted on the harshest penalties they could get. Judges would lecture about "personal responsibility." Even obviously bogus charges were followed until I defeated them by motion or trial.

This to me is one of the most disturbing aspects of our current legal system. The way prosecutor's whole professional reputation hinges upon having a lengthy resume of getting convictions and harsh punishments in every case, regardless of the nature of the case or even if the person was guilty. Nobody can afford to be seen as "soft" or "lenient", God forbid. They don't give a shit if the accused is legitimately innocent, if they think they can get away with a conviction anyway. I've heard of multiple instances of prosecutors continuing to push for the death penalty in spite of hard evidence of innocence, right up until the case is finally thrown out.
How the fuck do these people sleep at night?

Matt Taibbi has a book out all about this.

Anyway, I agree Holder was horrible for the reasons previously stated.

Obama should just appoint Al Sharpton himself or someone who is transgendered to score some more PC points.

@ Sp5:

Your experiences jive with mine exactly.

At the highest levels, the decision was made not to take any legal action on the white collar fraudsters, greedsters, and scammers who have been bleeding us white for the past 40 years.

A good measure of a president's worth is the quality, or lack thereof, of his attorney general. The president sets the tone.

Since every single president now is beholden to Wall Street for financing, nothing gets done to solve the problems that matter most. Eventually, the entire system will devolve into social unrest and violence, but by then the plutocrats will have already made their escape.

What we need is a man who looks like he's owned, but then doesn't stay owned.

Quote: (09-27-2014 12:43 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

@ Sp5:

Your experiences jive with mine exactly.

At the highest levels, the decision was made not to take any legal action on the white collar fraudsters, greedsters, and scammers who have been bleeding us white for the past 40 years.

A good measure of a president's worth is the quality, or lack thereof, of his attorney general. The president sets the tone.

Since every single president now is beholden to Wall Street for financing, nothing gets done to solve the problems that matter most. Eventually, the entire system will devolve into social unrest and violence, but by then the plutocrats will have already made their escape.

What we need is a man who looks like he's owned, but then doesn't stay owned.

Not going to happen. We have Hillary vs. Jeb being served up (Jeb is laying low now, but rest assured there will be a late rush to his nomination). That will be eight years gone, and then? We'll be too fucked, or even in smoking ruins (see my comment on Hillary in the Hillary thread).

I remembered, I had a civil case against a publicly traded company. The company was engaged in "fine print" scamming of a lot of people around the country. It was basically a fraud case.

It was pretty blatant, and the law on my side was clear enough. I found that even though I had very strong, even compelling legal and factual arguments, I could not get judges to pull the trigger on these guys.

These were the same judges who would put a guy in jail for a year on a probation violation for coming up positive on a piss test without blinking, even though the guy was working and struggling with an addiction.