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Jesse Eisinger

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70
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2017-07-23
most recent
2017-07-23
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1
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  1. “I think so. I think it contributed to Trump. It certainly contributed to the rise of the two most potent movements on the left and the right occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. I think it undergirds the anger of Trump and it undermined Hillary Clinton and Obama because I think people mistrusted them because they thought they were in the pocket of Wall Street. For this reason as paramount. So I thought it was one of the great scandals of our time and I thought it really deserved some kind of serious accounting that tried to get at the deep fundamental and corrosive aspects in society. This is not an easy problem and it's not an easy solution. And there's not it's not a conspiracy. Tim Geithner did not call up Eric Holder and say lay off. It's something more troubling because it's something more pernicious and more fundamental.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Right. That's the series that won the Pulitzer, which we were really grateful and lucky for. And after that, my colleagues and I sat around expecting to see some criminal investigation and nothing happened. And then we watched that nothing happened with Lehman Brothers or AIG or Bank of America or City. Go”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I have written every column known to man. I've written a daily. I've written it three times a week. I've written a weekly. Then you went to a monthly at”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So what happens is they find that these settlements are much easier to reach because the company has to come to the table and negotiate. The company says, well, we're just being extorted. We have to pay a fine because the cloud of a government investigation is so great we must resolve this. The prosecutor, that works, and there's some validity to that. And the prosecutor then says, well, we're going to enormous amount of money. What the prosecutors don't really do anymore is look at individuals. And the point of the Enron investigation, the point of starting the book with the Enron narrative, is that they put enormous amount of resources. They devoted an entire”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “People are and who the defense people are, who the pigs are on the one side and who the pigs are on the other side. And it's a deeply profoundly troubling and corrupt system when it allows corporate malefactors, individuals to get off.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Exactly. And so some of them went into kind of transactional work, which was very different. White-collar criminal defense was conducted by boutiques. The Department of Justice focused on individuals, not on corporates, non-corporations. And so there's been a complete transformation. And what I argue in the book is that big laws approach to how it defends corporations has developed alongside and in symbiosis with the Department of Justice's way that it approaches corporate prosecutions, investigations, and prosecutions, and they've all sort of influenced each other. And there's been this cross-pollination, and they go back and forth from the government to the private sector and back to the government and back to the private sector again. And now it's almost like that line at the end of animal farm where you could no longer tell who the government is.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Exactly. The most prestigious offices in the Department of Justice, the Southern District of New York, which does most of the Wall Street prosecutions and many corporate prosecutions, and main justice down in DC, those are now effectively like post jurisdictoral. Those are essentially postdoc employment for lawyers who are training to become white-collar defense work wasn't always there. It has not always been that way. In fact, in the 1960s, it wasn't that way at all. These prosecutors did not go to these white shoe firms. White shoe firms didn't really have this big corporate criminal investigation business.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And not only have we done it, we have privatized and outsourced it to the criminals themselves to conduct investigations of themselves. Alleged criminals. They hire their own attorneys. Their own attorneys conduct their investigations. These private law firms then deliver the results to the Department of Justice which reviews them and it gets worse because the prosecutor's who are reviewing them are tend to be people who are job candidates for the very law firms that are conducting the investigation.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Dirty Secret of American Corporate Jurisprudence is that we have privatized and outsourced corporate criminal investigations.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, it's problematic because this has become a giant racket for big law. And big law both likes the settlements. That provides a lot of work for them to investigate the corporations, big law firms like Paul Weiss, Debavoise, Covington and Burling do these investigations for these companies, for their corporate clients. And then they deliver the results to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice essentially reviews it without really looking at conducting the investigation in and of itself. You're saying the DO”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Exactly X number of years we're going to indict you and we can prove it in a court of law, they say, but we're just going to put this aside for now and try not to do anything again. Now, there are many problems with this. One is that there's no enforcement mechanism. Nobody really looks at it. Sometimes they install corporate monitors. That's a problem, a problematic solution.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Has been building since the backlash to Arthur Anderson. And what I argue now is that after Anderson they turn to corporate settlements. And in doing corporate settlements, deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Exactly. Just like Enron, Arthur Anderson was the auditor for WorldCom. And so I argue that Anderson was going down. And not only that, I argue that the partners wanted it to go down, wanted it to unwind. Now, this wasn't a corporation. It wasn't publicly traded. It was a partnership. And to avoid the liability from all the lawsuits, they literally had dozens and dozens, maybe over 100 lawsuits that they were facing and they were going to face more with WorldCom, it was a convenient excuse to say that the indictment caused the failure of the company. Of course, it didn't help. But you know what? My argument is that sometimes prosecutors can't worry about that, that their jobs are to do justice. Their jobs are not to cushion the blow for failing companies.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Multiple cities, not just one person. So this was a kind of system-wide thing. But in the lead-up to the crash, the Nasdaq crash, there was a pandemic of accounting malfeasance in corporate America. And chances are all”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And right. And that means not destroying documents and not destroying evidence. They went on an orgy of tons and tons of document destruction.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Exactly. And as Michael Cherdoff, who was the head of the criminal division at the time, says in my book, this wasn't an ice cream company that was destroying documents. This was a company that was part of its business was legal advice for investigations.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Arthur Anderson killed Arthur Anderson, and we should be very clear about that. And one of the big goals that I have in the book is to rehabilitate the prosecution of Arthur Anderson, because occasionally you do have to prosecute companies and put them out of business when they are rife with fraud, when they are serial abusers of the laws, the corporate laws as Anderson was. Now, what happened with Anderson is that they destroyed documents in the Enron. Well, back up before we...”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Exactly. And what they were arguing was that the prosecutors were overly aggressive, that they had overcharged the executives, particularly of Enron, and I focus on Enron. And then Arthur Anderson, which was the kind of seminal corporate prosecution.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Exactly. Hard time in the pokey. And so what changed? And really, I locate this as the backlash and the problem started then in the kind of lobbying effort, a corporate and white-collar defense bar lobbying effort against what they saw as overly zealous prosecutions of Enron and particularly Arthur Anderson.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “They were crucial is what my argument is. And, you know, so I started this book with this puzzle why don't we prosecute top corporate executives anymore? And I think it goes beyond just the financial crisis. Of course, we all know that no top bankers were put in prison for the financial crisis, but I think it started beforehand, this problem at the Justice Department, and it persists to today and it goes beyond the banks to industrial companies, retailers, tech companies, pharmaceuticals. And so I was trying to figure out this puzzle and I started with Enron because if you remember, and of course you do, we were talking at the time after the bubble burst, the Nasdaq bubble burst, there were a wave of prosecutions, not just Enron, but worldcoma, Delphia, Tycho, Global Crossing.”

    2017-07-23 · Masters in Business · Jesse Eisinger on Why White-Collar Criminals Get Off · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source