Elizabeth Warren Wants HSBC Bankers Jailed, Regulators Have Ties To Bank - FDL

[WillyT]

Elizabeth Warren Wants HSBC Bankers Jailed, Regulators Have Ties To Bank
By: DSWright - FDL
Friday March 8, 2013 9:39 am

<snip>

In a nation that has imprisoned millions (mostly poor, mostly minorities) of people for minor drug offenses a bank that laundered billions of dollars in drug money, HSBC, has walked away with a small fine. No jail time, no charter removal, just a few weeks profit and on the game goes.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is irritated by this clear double standard for the rich and decided to let the regulators know of her displeasure in a Senate hearing.

On Thursday, the Senate held a hearing to ask federal regulators why they are not stopping banks from allowing money laundering. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was the highlight of the show, slamming a Treasury official who refused to weigh in on whether the banks should face more severe penalties…

In December, the giant international bank HSBC was fined $1.9 billion for illegally allowing millions in Mexican drug trafficking money to be laundered through its accounts. But it’s not just HSBC—this is a systemic problem. Ten banks have been penalized in recent years for failure to comply with anti-money laundering rules.

Absent from the hearing was a representative from the Justice Department run by Eric Holder who recently claimed banks like HSBC were Too Big To Jail. The regulators’ excuse for not taking more severe action against HSBC was that Holder’s Justice Department failed to move a criminal case and therefore their hands were tied. Only after a criminal conviction was secured could Treasury move to take away HSBC’s charter.

The reality is, of course, that Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen has a few covert reason to be soft on HSBC having worked for the same law firm that HSBC’s current Chief Legal Officer Stuart Levey worked for – Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP. One big happy family. What’s a little drug money laundering among colleagues? I am sure Mr. Cohen was dying to really punish HSBC regardless of the consequences to future career prospects.

So as the incestuous circle goes round and round...

<snip>

More: http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/03/08/elizabeth-warren-wants-hsbc-bankers-jailed-regulators-have-ties-to-bank/

[JackRiddler]

1. Hooray for Warren. And as for David Cohen...

Is this the same David Cohen formerly of the CIA, who had the idea for Alec Station (the Bin Ladin unit) back in the 90s, ran operations, was highest-ranking CIA agent in New York, and then became the intel advisor to the NYPD (overturning the Handschuh limitations on surveillance)? What a pedigree.

[truedelphi]

2. Good to know!

Ain't it strange how long the weasels stay around to perpetuate the major corruption they are so fond of?

[think]

4. Thanks for that info /nt

[think]

3. K&R.

[Initech]

5. What HSBC is doing is committing terrorism. As such they should be branded enemies of the state.

Go Elizabeth Warren!!

[JackRiddler]

6. We've been protesting at HSBC headquarters in New York.

(World HQ is London, but they have a North American division.)

For much about this, see http://alternativebanking.nycga.net

[WillyT]

7. Thank You For That !!!

[KoKo]

11. KUDO's TO YOU "JR!" And thanks for report and link. n/t

[Fire Walk With Me]

22. Rock and Roll! :)

[Laurian]

8. I love watching Senator Warren turn these bureaucrats into

quivering mounds of jello. She is so direct and logical that their bullshit is brightly illuminated for us to see. I just wish more people would see her in action.

[silvershadow]

9. HSBC are the bastards that stole my house (and the $70,000 I gave them). nt

[theaocp]

10. FDL = automatic unrec

[Cleita]

12. She has been a real firebrand since she took her seat in the senate.

I hope she has other senators to bolster her.

[Starry Messenger]

13. I need an 'adore' smiley.

This one will do for now.

[SamKnause]

14. Eric Holder

It is blatantly apparent that we do NOT have a justice department and that Eric Holder has aided, abetted and enabled the thievery to continue !!!

[liberaltrucker]

15. George Carlin had it right

I paraphrase:

Execute a few Republican bankers who launder the drug money
and you'll see the drug supply dry up pretty fucking quick.
Hell you won't be able to buy drugs in prisons and schools.

[GiveMeFreedom]

27. I believe Carlin was a prophet for our generation. Loved him.

Thanks for the paraphrase.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

16. Thanks, I don't have to start this thread. How this debate is being spun...

The meme around Democratic circles is that Elizabeth Warren p'wnd Eric Holder this week


Fuck Holder, he's just a good soldier here. How could this not be seen as Warren's indictment of Obama on this matter?...'cause it is.

[bluestate10]

17. I was lucky enough to be in a position to vote for Senator Warren .

[JackRiddler]

18. I'm thinking it must be the same David Cohen, but...

Last edited Sat Mar 9, 2013, 10:29 AM - Edit history (3)

Here, lightly edited, is what I wrote on the CIA David Cohen on DU, in 2007, in a much longer post at http://journals.democraticunderground.com/JackRiddler/25

(Note: Turns out this is NOT the David Cohen mentioned in the OP, who is currently undersec of terrorism and finance intel at Treasury. So the following is now off-topic to this thread, but I hope interesting to you. Sorry!)

David Cohen:

The head official of the CIA in New York (i.e., at the time of 9/11, when the agency's largest domestic station outside Washington was demolished at WTC 7) was later acknowledged to be David Cohen.

He was the visionary (according to the 9/11 Commission Report) who in the 1990s initiated the Bin Ladin station in Langley. (He had served the agency for several years in the 1990s as Director of Operations - covert, that is.)

After Sept. 11th, Cohen spent several years as the top counter-terrorism and intel adviser to the NYPD under Bloomberg, effectively becoming the department's head policy-maker in the age of Homeland Security. The NYPD of course has become the homeland model for the rest of the country.

During this time, was Cohen NYPD or CIA? As we have seen, he was earlier working for the CIA while it was posing as another federal agency. In his capacity at the NYPD he would have also worked with the CIA station within the NYPD - a standard feature of major urban police departments - so in some sense it doesn't matter where the paycheck comes from.

In 2002 Cohen on behalf of the NYPD led the charge to gain a court ruling overturning the Handschuh agreement of 1985, which had limited police surveillance of political groups and videotaping of demonstrations by requiring all such actions to be approved within 48 hours by a board of two police officials and a civilian appointee.

Presumably he had a big hand in New York's many maneuvers and wargames since then, including the RNC actions (2004) which amounted to martial law for Midtown and included mass arrests by means of impromptu fencing used as a lasso to rope off 100 people at a time, etc. (Now a standard feature for demonstrations around the country, it was first rolled out at the time.)

[WillyT]

19. Thank You For That !!!

[JackRiddler]

25. You're welcome but turns out I'm wrong...

It's not the same guy.

I'll leave the David "CIA" Cohen post up, though, because he's a character worth knowing.

[johnnyreb]

20. He's a Different Cohen

Judging by the pics and info on History Commons:

Profile: David Cohen
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=david_cohen_1

The guy under Warren-fire in the video is younger, and graduated Yale Law in 1989.

Now, there might possibly be a remarkable family likeness between these two.

[JackRiddler]

23. Okay, gotta back off from it then...

People with generic names, I swear.

I mean, he's the undersecretary for terrorism investigations and he's not the same Cohen? I guess it would be a demotion for the CIA Cohen, wouldn't it now?

Never mind I looked at the pictures - different guys altogether.

If they're related, no surprise. Also no surprise if they're not related, however.

Thanks for the correction!

[johnnyreb]

26. You have taught me much, JackRiddler

I have lurked here some years. The thanks go to you.

[JackRiddler]

30. *blush* and thanks, johnnyreb!

Maybe you'll be interested in this other board as well:
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/index.php

Some of my favorite threads there:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=18194&p=437519#p437519

[Fire Walk With Me]

21. K&R!

[burrowowl]

24. Love Elizabeth!

[Zorra]

28. K&R nt

[smirkymonkey]

29. Elizabeth Warren kicks ass!

I am so proud that she is my senator. I hope she will go far.

[JackRiddler]

31. It's worse than that! "Meet David S. Cohen of Treasury and Stuart Levey of HSBC"

Meet David S. Cohen of Treasury and Stuart Levey of HSBC - Or Is It the Other Way Around?

Here is a glimpse into the incestuous world of what C. Wright Mills termed the "power elite," where the really key people are the ones who move seamlessly between the "private" and "public" sectors:

1) Since June 2011, the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at Treasury has been one David S. Cohen (Yale Law School, 1989). "As Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Cohen leads the Treasury Department’s policy, enforcement, regulatory, and intelligence functions aimed at identifying and disrupting the lines of financial support to international terrorist organizations, proliferators, narcotics traffickers, and other illicit actors posing a threat to our national security. He is also responsible for directing the Department’s efforts to combat money laundering and financial crimes." Since 2009, Cohen had already been Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing.

2) Based on these portfolios, we would rightly expect Mr. Cohen's responsibilities to have included gathering intelligence on the notorious money laundering entity, HSBC, which recently admitted to laundering billions of dollars for the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels and to violating rules on dealings with "terrorist" organizations in a settlement with the Justice Department that absolved all HSBC executives from a criminal investigation (December 2012). http://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/Pages/cohen-e.aspx

3) David S. Cohen (it's important to distinguish him from other David Cohens of note) also worked for the Treasury in 1999 to 2001, when he "was involved in crafting legislation that formed the basis of Title III of the USA PATRIOT Act, the 2001 update to the Bank Secrecy Act that provided Treasury new tools to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism." Once again, sounds just like HSBC. In between his first stint at Treasury and his current stint at Treasury, Cohen worked seven years for the big DC legal firm Wilmer Hale Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, focusing on "civil and criminal litigation, the defense of regulatory investigations into accounting and financial fraud, and anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance advice for a broad range of financial institutions including banks, broker-dealers, insurance companies, mutual funds and hedge funds." In other words, at Treasury he is supposed to investigate the very same kind of entities that he had spent seven years defending while at Wilmer Hale.

4) The door's been revolving a lot longer than that. In the 1990s, Cohen practiced nine years at DC firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP, specializing in "white collar criminal defense and civil litigation," again working for the kinds of firms he is now supposed to be investigating. Miller Cassidy later merged into an even more ginormous DC lawyer-lobbyist entity, Baker Botts LLP (in which the Baker is none other than former Secretary of State James Baker). While at Miller Cassidy, Cohen would have surely made the acquaintance of another high-powered lawyer working there named Stuart Levey.

So who is Stuart Levey and why do we care?

5) Stuart Levey (Harvard Law School, 1989), worked at Miller Cassidy (later Baker Botts) as a litigation practitioner for 11 years before joining the Justice Department in 2001. In 2004 the Bush government appointed him the first Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the US Department of the Treasury, a position in which he served until February 2011 under Presidents Bush and Obama. In other words, Stuart Levey was the almost-direct predecessor to David S. Cohen as the "top cop" at Treasury for money laundering investigations. And this after both had been working at Miller Cassidy for nearly a decade in the 1990s.

5) More about Stuart Levey's intimate connections to both the US Treasury and the Justice Department: "After leaving the Treasury Department, Mr Levey was a Senior Fellow for National Security and Financial Integrity at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to his Treasury appointment, Mr Levey served as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General at the US Department of Justice, having previously served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General and as the Chief of Staff of the Deputy Attorney General."

6) Where is Stuart Levey today? Why, he's on the HSBC Board of Directors as the Chief Legal Officer of HSBC Holdings plc, the parent company of HSBC operations worldwide. We got the above information about Mr. Levey from his HSBC bio page. http://www.hsbc.com/globals/hsbc-people/senior-managers/stuart-levey There we learned he has been the firm's Chief Legal Officer since January 2012, and thus would have been intimately involved in the crafting of HSBC's December 2012 "Get Out of Jail Free" settlement with the Justice Department, in which intelligence from David S. Cohen's group at Treasury must have played a role (based on Cohen's portfolio, anyway; we are not yet privy to exactly what inside dealings went on in advance of the settlement).

And remember, HSBC's Levey was Cohen's predecessor at his present job as the top money laundering "investigator" at Treasury.

Small world!

I'll be posting the above later today at alternativebanking.nycga.net.

THANK YOU WILLY T FOR POINTING OUT THESE CONNECTIONS!

[WillyT]

32. Thank YOU !!!

[johnnyreb]

33. Baker Botts

Some Baker Botts background:

In a series of rulings, a number of defendants are removed from a 9/11 lawsuit filed in August 2002 (see August 15, 2002). The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 9/11 victims’ relatives, accuses a number of individuals and organizations of funding and supporting al-Qaeda and thus helping the 9/11 attacks to occur. ....
Some of the Saudi princes, such as Prince Sultan and Prince Salman, are represented in the case by the prestigious Dallas-based law firm of Baker Botts. James Baker, former Secretary of State and close associate of the Bush family, is one of the senior partners of the law firm.
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=baker_and_botts

6,600 9/11 families statement Sept. 20, 2012:

"Until we get everyone who financed and supported 9/11, including the Saudis, we are not going to stop."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/on-behalf-of-the-911-families-united-to-bankrupt-terrorism-170555486.html

Plaintiff families' lawfirm:

"Our attorneys are seeking justice for 9/11 victims and families by uncovering the support structures and resources of terrorist groups and bankrupting their material sponsors."
http://www.motleyrice.com/anti-terrorism-and-human-rights/9-11-families-united-to-bankrupt-terrorism

Joe Scarborough, on former-senators Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey supporting the lawsuit ~March 2012

[JackRiddler]

34. Yes! I have a great blog post thanks to you, Willy T! (PLEASE all read!)

Based on various posts in this thread, here's a more complete rendering of the story of DS Cohen & S Levey.

Please read the below and spread it, and get involved!

OWS Alt-Banking will continue its campaign to raise awareness about HSBC (and other banks') criminality, and maybe even make enough public pressure to get the ball rolling to bring HSBC to justice. That's up to everyone.

If you're not in New York to come to our meetings and actions, you can contact us and get your own actions started in your own town.

Meet David S. Cohen of Treasury and Stuart Levey of HSBC – Or Is It the Other Way Around?
http://alternativebanking.nycga.net/2013/03/09/meet-david-s-cohen-of-treasury-and-stuart-levey-of-hsbc-or-is-it-the-other-way-around/

[Iwillnevergiveup]

35. K&R, Willy!

I have a feeling heads are going to start to roll - lots of information is getting out there that can't be disputed or ignored. Ask the reddest of red wingnuts and see if anyone in that crowd believes drug money laundering is an American or family value. Elizabeth Warren is just the pitbull to go after these criminals, and let's watch and see how many other elected officials jump on the bandwagon, too.