Tabbi: Eric Holder Has No Balls

Eric Holder is as useless as tits on a nun. He'll use the FBI to go after a husband and wife who lied on an application for a $560,000 loan but when it comes to working some of that diablerie on Wall Street firms whose machinations took down the world economy, well, as Matt Taibbi has said, Holder has no balls.

Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report – the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.

In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully "aligned" with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.

If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?

Taibbi and Eliot Spitzer chatted about Holder's lack of gonadular fortitude last week.



Sadly, there's more of it. Yesterday Holder announced that there would be no prosecutions for CIA torture and the deaths of prisoners.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” his statement said. It said the investigation “was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.”

Oooh, I'm sure the CIA is just reeling from that stentorian bit of verbal fingerwagging. If I were a tinpot dictator or a Chinese foreign dignitary, you can bet your ass I'd be pointing to these instances the next time Hillary “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family” Clinton deigned to lecture me about human rights and/or the rule of law. “You assholes tie yourselves up in semantic knots to justify violating the Geneva Conventions and your Department of Justice won’t even go after those crooks on Wall Street after another part of your government handed them the evidence!”