CT Blue

Eric Holder, two days ago:

Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday said the suicide death of internet activist Aaron Swartz was a “tragedy,” but the hacking case against the 26-year-old was “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”

Holder, the nation’s top prosecutor, is the highest-ranking member of the President Barack Obama administration to defend the indictment and prosecution of the former director of Demand Progress, who committed suicide in January as his April trial approached. Holder’s comments come seven weeks after Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, whose office was prosecuting Swartz, said the authorities’ actions were “appropriate in bringing and handling this case.”

(via Wired.com)

Meanwhile, here’s what he said the next day about how he elects to use his own prosecutorial discretion when the perpetrator is a bank:

Yesterday Attorney General Holder stated openly what was already apparent. The Justice Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk.

Here’s what Holder said

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he said. “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

(via Reader Supported News)

It’s not just that he believes these things. It’s the fact that he follows one statement with another, without, apparently, any idea of how they play against one another. It’s fine to drive a kid to suicide for doing things some of the victims didn’t even mind, while you give a free pass to people who are engaged in criminal conspiracies to game the financial system for their own benefit, with economic catastrophe a side benefit the rest of us have to experience, though not the guys who brought it on. Not to mention that if Holder feels these banks are too big, maybe he ought to give some thought to the fact that he’s the guy whose supposed to do something about that.