PuffHo: Obama Screwed up by Appointing Comey

“Barack Obama Named James Comey FBI Chief For All The Wrong Reasons”

Comey shares two of the Obama administration’s most consistent and unnerving legal leanings: a proclivity for mass surveillance and an aversion to Wall Street accountability.

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If Obama wanted to invoke novel legal theories to pursue mass surveillance, then Comey was a pretty solid bet. But another aspect of Comey’s resume may also have comforted the Obama administration. In 2010, he took a job as the top lawyer at Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, with over $150 billion in assets under management. In early 2013, he briefly accepted a post on the board of scandal-plagued British bank HSBC, which he gave up for the FBI job.

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But work at a weird hedge fund wasn’t disqualifying in an administration that had long made clear it was not interested in prosecuting financial crime. The Obama administration has settled billions of dollars in cases against big banks for everything from rigging energy markets to illegally foreclosing on homeowners, but top executives have avoided prosecution. Even when banks themselves pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion and interest-rate-rigging, the Obama administration declined to prosecute the actual bankers involved.”

Remember MF Global and Jon Corzine? We have covered the fiasco where Corzine took money from customer’s trust accounts and invested in Very risky European derivatives and lost it. He was never arrested. Coverage here, Here, Here, and more.

The Obama administration has pursued some cases of fraud but not others. They have a reason for this selectivity.

In hindsight, even the Huffington Post, who have unfailingly supported Barack Obama, have come to the conclusion that James Comey may not have been the man to head the FBI. Their objection sounds a lot like the problem they have with Comey is that he isn’t protecting the President or Mrs. Clinton well enough.