Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street reform plan, which she outlined Monday in a New York Times op-ed, calls for greater personal accountability for the same banking executives that have supported her campaigns for years.
“[E]xecutives need to be held more accountable,” Clinton wrote. “No one should be too big to jail.”
But Clinton has raked in donations throughout her career from executives who skirted successful prosecution after the financial crisis. During the last Democratic presidential debate, she attempted to explain away Wall Street’s longtime support of her Senate campaigns by claiming big banks’ contributions stemmed from the geographic location of the 9/11 terror attacks.
For example, Goldman Sachs executives together gave more than $750,000 to Clinton’s Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The financial firm has paid her and her husband generous six-figure speaking fees to attend events hosted by Goldman Sachs executives.
Goldman Sachs has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
The investment bank, like a number of other financial institutions, took billions of bailout dollars from the federal government in 2008 at the height of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Bank of America’s chief executive, Ken Lewis, famously dodged serious punishment after civil litigation revealed his bank had fraudulently packaged and sold billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities. Lewis was permitted to retire with an enormous pension.
Clinton has welcomed campaign contributions from Bank of America’s remaining ranks, taking in more than $90,000 from its executives between April and September alone. In fact, Bank of America is among her top donors this cycle, as is Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has personally fundraised for Clinton in the past and speculated in September that he “might” do so again for her 2016 campaign.
Dimon led JPMorgan when it sustained billions in losses during the financial crisis and retained his position even after his bank was found to have misled investors.
JPMorgan Chase executives rank among Clinton’s top donors, giving roughly $100,000 directly to her campaign between April and September.
Virtually no banking executives faced jail time despite admissions from many of the financial firms that caused the crisis that they had willfully covered up warning signs before the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who presided over the Justice Department’s inaction in the wake of the financial crisis, decamped to his old law firm Covington & Burling after leaving the administration in a move critics have highlighted as evidence of officials’ complicity in allowing guilty executives to walk. Covington & Burling represents Wall Street titans such as Citigroup and Wells Fargo.
Covington & Burling has given between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation, donor records show.
In October, the Clinton Foundation quietly hired a former Citigroup executive to be its executive vice president, despite the fact that Citigroup had accepted more bailout funds than any other Wall Street firm and exposed the federal government to more potential loss than any other offending bank.
