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December 12, 2012

Sounds About Right …

Filed under: Probable Cause — Bill @ 7:10 am

I was reading in today’s local skewspaper, the Coeur d’Alene Press, that several of our “honorable” district court judges had sentenced some drug users to determinate penitentiary time for possession of controlled substances.   Two years in the pen seems to be the favored sentences for the local judges who want to appear to be tough on crime.

In contrast, our crackerjack US Department of Justice just couldn’t seem to find one HSBC bank official or collection of bank officials who had any criminal intent in making HSBC the bank of choice for international drug cartels and money launderers. Imagine that!

Our local prosecuting attorney goes after the low-hanging fruit and our local judges  agreeably go along and jail users for years while our US Attorney General Eric Holder, Assistant US Attorney General Lanny Breuer (see Breuer’s press conference comments), and US Attorney Loretta Lynch just couldn’t find any criminal intent in any HSBC official’s actions.

For once, I agree with the New York Times.

As a former Treasury Department money laundering investigator Jimmy Gurule said about the HSBC scheme, “We’re not talking about mere negligence. We’re talking about a criminal scheme that was adopted as a policy of HSBC that involved looking the other way in regard to suspicious transactions involving money laundering.”

Drug users in Idaho go to prison.  Crooked bankers who financially enable and empower the drug cartels and terrorist-sponsoring countries pay fines and dine with elected officials in Washington.

Sounds about right.

4 Comments

  1. Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank.
    Give a man a bank, he can rob the world.

    Comment by Dan — December 12, 2012 @ 7:24 am

  2. Give a man a bank and access to elected officials, and he can rob the world with immunity from prosecution.

    Comment by Bill — December 12, 2012 @ 7:51 am

  3. Yeah, it sounds about right. I was reading the article in the CDAPress referring to our local city embezzlement case and the article mentioned that the District Attorney did not know how she spent the 365K. “The United States District Attorney’s office said it does not know how Carroll spent the money.”

    Some investigation.

    Comment by Stebbijo — December 12, 2012 @ 8:37 am

  4. In Breuer’s comment (linked above), he said, “Today, HSBC is paying a heavy price for its conduct, and, under the terms of today’s agreement, if the bank fails to comply with the agreement in any way, we reserve the right to fully prosecute it.”

    If the grounds existed to “fully prosecute,” and if that term means “criminally prosecute,” then how does that square with this from the newspaper article: “As for the lack of criminal prosecutions, the feds said that they never found one bank official, or any collection of bank officials acting together, that were doing this on purpose.”? If the evidence for full prosecution (criminal prosecution) existed then, it should have been filed and prosecuted criminally then. No, the fines levied by the Justice Department amounted to a payoff to let the well-heeled, big-contributor bank officials walk. We shouldn’t be surprised when local prosecutors and judges make filing decisions and render opinions that amount to the same “justice” on a local scale.

    Comment by Bill — December 13, 2012 @ 7:15 am

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