With the
financial sector sure to summon massive amounts of money and resources to
battle any criminal or civil prosecutions over its role in the 2008 crisis, a
key is how much resources authorities will have at their disposal to battle
back.
When New York
attorney general Eric Schneiderman appeared
before the Congressional Progressive Caucus in late April, he asked the members
to help him obtain funding for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities
working group, which he co-chairs. “If you want to help me badger everybody,
that’s good,” he said. “I’m a good badger by myself but I know there are some
experts in this room.”
Yesterday,
Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to
get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.
She offered an
amendment to a large appropriations
bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the
Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the
DoJ asked for in its budget request
for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters
proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully
fund the $55 million request.
“Considering
the retirement of the space shuttle program and a shift in NASA’s priorities, I
believe we should use the funds in these accounts to help bring justice to
defrauded investors, homeowners, and consumers,” she said on the House floor.
Representative
Brad Miller also rose in support of Waters’ amendment. Though Miller was turned down
for the job of executive director—because, he believes, the working group was
afraid of industry blowback—Waters has been circulating a letter, signed by
forty members of Congress, asking the working group to hire him anyway.
Miller strongly
urged members to fully fund the RMBS investigation. “Every [Wall Street]
defendant would have a defense team that would make the O.J. defense team look
like a public defender, two years out of law school, handling 100 other cases,”
he said. “We would be swamped by the opposition.
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