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So it’s not surprising to see the left up in arms over the nomination of former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White by President Barack Obama to head the SEC. White had a long and widely-praised career as a public prosecutor and then went to private practice. There she represented big banks and, among others, Time Warner, the parent company of Time Magazine, in a suit brought by Donald Trump that was eventually dismissed.
To summarize the case against White: because she represented financial titans including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, she’s morally tainted, sympathetic to the plight of big banks, and inevitably inclined to lean in their favor.
In the real world, where politics, economics and the law are much bigger than any one player, those same big banks should be scared witless this morning at the prospect of having Mary Jo White as a top enforcer.
First, she has a reputation as one of the toughest prosecutors in the country. Lightweights don’t run the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, and during her nine years in charge her list of busts was prodigious.
Second, her ethical reputation is unchallenged, despite the sudden urge to damn her by association. “Mary Jo has an impeccable reputation for integrity and professionalism,” says William Burck, who worked for her in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and is now co-managing partner of the DC office of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Most important, she’s seen the banks naked.
As the top lawyer for Bank of America in a fraud litigation brought by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, she came to know everything about their books, their vulnerabilities and where and whether they crossed the line “Her time representing big banks should be viewed as an asset, not a liability,” says Burck. “She knows more about what is effective and ineffective regulation than just about anybody.”
Play the scenario out. An SEC investigator finds potential impropriety at a bank and opens an investigation. Even if White is recused because of specific representation of the bank, are the targets of the investigation more or less likely to cover their tracks or come clean knowing White is running the place and knowing that she has seen not just the banks’ general strategy for outmaneuvering regulators, but the details of how they do it?
Sure, the revolving door can lead to regulatory capture. But the mismatch between private industry and government in skills, knowledge and capacity is much more likely to produce that problem. Hiring someone who has seen the ugliest of the big banks is a smart choice.
In the binary world of wing-nut commentators, everything is personal. What matters most to ideologues is individuals taking absolute positions in a battle of good versus evil: you’re either with us or you’re against us, and professional association is moral allegiance, regardless of the circumstances.
Aguirre didn't stand a chance. A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued. "It all happened so fast, I needed a seat belt," recalls Aguirre, who had just received a stellar performance review from his bosses. The SEC eventually paid Aguirre a settlement of $755,000 for wrongful dismissal.
I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.
I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?
Second, her ethical reputation is unchallenged, despite the sudden urge to damn her by association. “Mary Jo has an impeccable reputation for integrity and professionalism,” says William Burck, who worked for her in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and is now co-managing partner of the DC office of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Originally posted by jacobe001
HA!
I had to laugh at this part:
Second, her ethical reputation is unchallenged, despite the sudden urge to damn her by association. “Mary Jo has an impeccable reputation for integrity and professionalism,” says William Burck, who worked for her in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s the office and is now co-managing partner of the DC office of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Just who do these people think they are fooling??
She stopped an investigation and got a guy fired for doing his job.
She is a Financial Terrorist that needs to be locked up along with a bunch of other Wall Street Cockroaches.