| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019847)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019847" |
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| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
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| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Even there his record was more mixed than is popularly understood. As Sheelah Kolhatkar |
| demonstrates in her propulsive and riveting "Black Edge," when it came to bringing his |
| biggest whale to justice, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital, the Southern District blinked. They |
| did not charge him, only securing a guilty plea from his firm. |
| Present and former prosecutors say Bharara did not give much emphasis to investigations |
| arising from the financial meltdown, an approach shared by his boss, Attorney General Eric |
| Holder. Justice Department insiders say many of those inquiries withered not because they |
| were unpromising, but because they had little support. |
| Bharara missed an opportunity by not bringing any significant criminal charges against |
| individuals in the wake of the collapses of Lehman, investment bank Merrill Lynch, the |
| insurer AIG, the mortgage securities and collateralized debt obligation businesses, or the |
| myriad public misrepresentations from bank CEOs about their finances. |
| Bharara and senior officials in Washington argue that there were no criminal cases to file |
| after the 2008 crisis. But the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan did pursue significant civil |
| cases against the banks for their mortgage activities, cases that had to proove misconduct by |
| the "preponderance of the evidence." And DOJ did win guilty pleas from the banks |
| themselves, an indication that prosecutors might have been able to charge individuals for |
| their part in crimes their institutions had acknowledged. Academics who studied those years, |
| including Columbia's Tomasz Piskorski and James Witkin and Chicago's Amit Seru found |
| widespread patterns of fraud in the mortgage business. |
| The exception makes this failure all the more puzzling. As I detailed in 2014, Bharara's |
| office brought one case for misconduct during the financial crisis - against a mid-level |
| banker. Prosecutors charged Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse with overseeing traders |
| who knowingly misrepresented the value of mortgage securities. Serageldin pleaded guilty |
| and went to prison. |
| Serageldin's colleagues in the industry and others familiar with Credit Suisse found it hard |
| to believe that he was the only person involved in that particular fraud. |
| Bharara's reluctance to pursue senior executives was seen in other investigations of big |
| banks. His office wrested a $1.7 billion fine from JPMorgan Chase over its complicity in the |
| Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, but it brought no charges against individual bankers. |
| One odd aspect of his tenure was the Southern District's willingness to defer to other |
| jurisdictions when it came to Wall Street cases. |
| Historically, the SDNY has been the leading enforcers of securities laws, nicknamed the |
| "sovereign district" for its propensity to grab corporate fraud cases from elsewhere on the |
| flimsiest of jurisdictional pretexts. Under Bharara, the southern district let other U.S. |
| attorneys claim investigations into residential mortgage-backed securities, the instruments at |
| the heart of the financial crisis. Those other offices were not nearly as versed in complex |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019847 |
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|
