In a significant ruling today, a federal appeals court overturned a conviction of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, obtained through a military commission. Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a George W. Bush appointee seen as a possible conservative Supreme Court justice, wrote in a ruling for a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court that Hamdan [...]

Following up on this earlier item about the Justice Department’s impotence in prosecuting financial fraud, take a look at what they’ve been reduced to promoting (h/t Marcy): Attorney General Eric Holder, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, FBI Associate Deputy Director Kevin L. Perkins and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Jon Leibowitz today [...]

This is an amusing ad by the Obama campaign, poking fun at Mitt Romney’s comment in the first debate about eliminating funding for PBS and Big Bird. President Obama has been getting good traction on the stump with the line about Romney looking out for Wall Street while fighting Sesame Street, and so they turned [...]

Before last night’s debate, Jeff Connaughton, former chief of staff to Senator Ted Kaufman and longtime aide to Joe Biden and President Clinton, offered some advice to Mitt Romney. He thought Romney should go after Barack Obama’s biggest weakness: the failure to prosecute Wall Street crimes. In actuality, Romney only submitted a glancing blow with [...]

With the narrow, potentially confusing but generally beneficial ruling yesterday in the Pennsylvania voter ID case, the trend is confirmed: voting rights activists have successfully fended off a number of voter suppression tactics put forward by Republicans seeking to model the electorate to their benefit in 2012. The result, that Pennsylvanians will not have to [...]

I can actually agree with a lot in Alison Frankel’s assessment of the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase over mortgage backed securities deficiencies. She’s right to express all the ways in which this is a cynical case, building on years-old legal work from bond insurers and investors. But she follows with this: [...]

One thing I want to emphasize about the lawsuit against Bear Stearns on securitization fraud put together by Eric Schneiderman’s office is that it’s rooted in reality. Indeed, Bear Stearns did misrepresent to investors the quality of the loans they placed in mortgage backed security pools, did ignore warnings from third-party due diligence specialists about [...]

Late yesterday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit made up of years-old evidence against JPMorgan Chase, over deceptive practices related to the sale of $87 billion in Bear Stearns mortgage-backed securities at the height of the housing bubble. The lawsuit is closely modeled after one brought against the same defendants by the [...]

MoveOn.org has sent a finding of fact to the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, asking that they initiate an investigation into whether Mitt Romney lied on a federal financial disclosure form. This is an issue that arose back in July, during the debate over precisely when Romney left his job at Bain Capital. [...]

A Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the Fast and Furious matter largely exonerates Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming that he knew nothing about the gun-running operation until after the death of a US Border Patrol agent. The report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz said there is “no evidence that … Holder [...]

You might have guessed that I don’t have a ton of respect for our nation’s regulatory apparatus, particularly in the finance space. Too often, regulators listen to their Wall Street friends over the nuances of the law, are slow to identify abuses and slower still to crack down on them, and when they finally get [...]