WASHINGTON — Loretta Lynch has been at the top of the Justice Department for less than two weeks, but she’s already getting some tough advice from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Warren, a crusader against easy money policies on Wall Street and a major thorn in the side of some of the biggest bankers in the world, took Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to task on Tuesday night for letting banks enter into agreements that allow them to pay fines without admitting guilt.
“It is time for the Justice Department and the SEC to get serious about enforcing our laws about financial fraud,” Warren said at a swanky dinner here for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, had a mixed record in policing banks. Though he extracted record fines — with Bank of America paying the largest ever fine for a single company of $17 billion — he didn’t charge a single executive.
Those multibillion dollar agreements have “transformed into a get-out-of-jail-free card for the biggest corporations in the world” and let them dictate some of the terms of their punishment, Warren said.
The call against regulators isn’t new for Warren, who — despite being a darling of progressives — hasn’t hesitated to call out those agencies she thinks are asleep at the switch.
The lawmaker even suggested that William Dudley, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was in danger of losing his job if he didn’t put some distance between himself and the bankers he’s supposed to police.
“If the big banks keep calling the shots, they will own both our economy and our democracy,” she said during the Tuesday
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