Coalition of housing advocates turns against DoJ and Eric Holder

[brentspeak]

They are accusing Holder's DoJ of deliberately stonewalling and undermining investigations into Wall St's role in the mortgage meltdown crisis. Basically, they are saying that the Obama-created task force on this issue has itself been a whitewash and a fraud.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/12/housing-groups-point-to-justice-department-as-stonewalling-investigations-into-banks/

Housing Groups Point to Justice Department as Stonewalling Investigations into Banks

By: David Dayen Thursday July 12, 2012 10:27 am

A coalition of housing advocates that supported the state/federal investigation into securitization abuses that accompanied the foreclosure fraud settlement has turned against it sharply, charging the Justice Department with stonewalling the investigation and denying it critical resources that could move prosecutions against leading banks for their role in the housing crash and subsequent economic crisis.

The coalition, including Campaign for a Fair Settlement, the New Bottom Line, and members of the Campaign for America’s Future, have been frustrated with the agonizingly slow pace of the investigations into the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) working group for some time. But the focus on DoJ, and Eric Holder in particular, is new, and frankly a bit implausible.

It was fairly clear to some of us when the RMBS working group was announced inside a revived financial fraud enforcement task force that it would be a repository for existing investigations that could be re-branded as “going after the banks” in an election year. Indeed, masaccio has found the task force taking credit for investigations having nothing to do with securitization abuses. So the slow-walking of investigations should really come as no surprise: “task force” is what people in Washington create when they don’t want to do anything about a particular issue. Delaying the investigations also serves the purpose of allowing statutes of limitations to run out on various financial frauds.

[tularetom]

1. Wanna kill some program?

Form a "task force" and study it to death.

[pscot]

2. Round up the usual suspects

The task forces was starved for resources:

"We believe this is a management, leadership, and political problem," he said. Kettenring (Brian Kettenring of the Campaign for a Fair Settlement) pointed out that the DOJ had 93 investigators checking allegations that former major league pitcher Roger Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs and then lied about it before Congress. By contrast, Kettenring said, the mortgage fraud task force has a grand total of about 100 investigators, not all of them from the DOJ.

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/ViewNews.aspx?id=51993&terms=%40ReutersTopicCodes+CONTAINS+'ANV'