From Shadow Warrior:

“About Preet Bharara, the attorney who went after Rajat Gupta. He simply won’t go after Jon Corzine of MF Global whose committed massive fraud.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/political_slowdown_in_corzine_probe_nSVAZMDLP4Neo2z3UjiwhM

The publicity hungry and hyper-ambitious Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District, as well as the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are all longtime Democrats.

Some, like Bharara, are fairly partisan Democrats looking for bigger future jobs. They have much to gain if the investigation doesn’t blow up before Election Day — so it’s pretty convenient that they keep hitting what we’re told are dead ends.

Bharara is rumored to be on the short list of possible successors to Attorney General Eric Holder in a second Obama term, as is FBI chief Robert Mueller.

In other cases, Bharara’s been so eager to drum up good press that’s he’s falsely taken credit for personally recording wiretapped conversations of alleged insider traders. Which makes it odd that he’s said so little about MF Global, the biggest scandal to develop on his watch — especially when we’ve got real victims here, whereas it’s usually impossible to trace investors’ losses in insider-trading cases.”

Arvind said… I do not think it is the crab syndrome. Bharara went after Bernie Madoff. He is part of the Democratic Party machinery.

He seems to be setting himself up for a run at the Governorship of NY. It is SOP to arrest some Wall Street tycoons and then use it as a talking point in elections.

Jon Corzine is a Democrat who was a Senator from NJ and was also its Governor”

Conrad Black at the Huffington Post

“But in the blame game, the political class locked arms to scream from the Capitol and White House steps and from the skyscraper tops that “greed” was the problem, in the private sector of course. The tangible encouragements heaped by unsound countrywide on, inter alia, Chris Dodd of Dodd Frank, didn’t count — i.e. the politicians aren’t counting. And Attorney General Holder and his acolytes in the federal prosecution service such as Time‘s current cover heart-throb, set out to end the debate by indicting the opposition debating team, with the enthusiastic collusion of most of America’s bovine, law and order-deluded national media.

Thus the instant pantheonizee, Preet Bharara, who is in fact chasing after alleged inside traders, an activity which had nothing to do with the economic crisis, “collars the masters of the meltdown.” He may be a capable and even, against the odds, a principled prosecutor, but this fatuous bit of Time-puffery does not incite optimism on that score.

If Time had had the privilege of a Damascene bolt of revelatory lightning (that it did not mistake for a UFO), it would have mentioned, as more serious magazines such as the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnick and the Economist recently have, that the U.S. criminal justice system is a compost-heap of corruption and hypocrisy. All is governed by the plea bargain system, the wholesale extortion and subornation of perjury in exchange for immunity or a reduced sentence. The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guaranties of the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution, of no seizure of property without due compensation, of due process, an impartial jury, access to counsel, prompt justice, and reasonable bail, have long since shrivelled into figments of the imagination of the sentimental, without that erosion being noticed by the national media or even the Supreme Court.“

Comment:

Well, as to promptness, the system here is prompt enough, at least compared to, say, India.  But that’s the problem. Sometimes, it’s better for things to take a long time. It would make prosecutors less inclined to prosecute anything but the most egregious offenses, and it would make citizens less willing to go to court, unless they’d suffered the worst kind of injury.

Sonofagun.

More evidence below of the dangerous proclivities of this dangerous man, who, I suspect is carrying on some covert agenda.

I mean wire-tapping businessmen doesn’t only endanger civil liberties. It also threatens the intellectual property of businessmen.

All those trading records, and company filings, and personal information are now on the government’s files.

That can shade ever so easily into corporate espionage, right?

How do you know the government doesn’t send the information it collects to favored corporations?

The FBI has just rolled out a big campaign against foreign espionage on American businesses. Nothing wrong about that.There’s a lot of theft of trade secrets.

But then, maybe it should start looking closer to home.  Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, all the hosting companies and even the encryption software – all of them are reading your files, your folders, your emails, your documents, your voip chat.  But of course, they would never be trading on that inside knowledge, would they? And what about the phone companies? And the software in the Justice Dept or at Homeland Security?  Between Amdocs (Israeli firm), CACI (Israeli-American), NSA (USG), Echelon (USG) and the rest of them, every single word, keystroke, and maybe even your thoughts (mind-reading software) is being logged and kept on file with the government and its buddies. And they don’t make a dime off all that, do they?

Is Preet Bharara spying for the empire, under the guise of conducting criminal investigations? Is he spying out where the money is, so under some flimsy legal pretext, the government can seize it? Is this just war by other means?

Dealbook

“Mr. Bharara himself appears to have shifted his focus — at least publicly — away from the prosecution of financial fraud. In recent months, cybercrime has become a top concern, with Mr. Bharara mentioning the subject with increasing frequency in articles and speeches, just as he had in past years with insider trading. Indeed, even as his office was busy trying Mr. Gupta, Mr. Bharara wrote an op-ed article in The New York Times, saying that he had “come to worry about few things as much as the gathering cyberthreat.” At a cybersecurity conference in January, he listed it as his top concern.

“Of all the issues I face as United States attorney — and there are many, many things that I have to deal with that are scary — cyberthreat in all of its breadth, variety and complexity is what worries me the most, the absolute most,” he told attendees.

So far, his office has brought just a handful of such cases, and not all have been home runs. In January, prosecutors charged two Russians with stealing personal and financial information from United States citizens through the use of computer programs. Last year, an appeals court vacated the conviction of a Goldman Sachs computer programmer accused of stealing trading programs from the investment bank.

It is unlikely, however, that insider trading investigations will grind to a halt anytime soon. Several cases remain outstanding, including the prosecution of Anthony Chiasson, a co-founder of the once-prominent hedge fund Level Global Investors. And examinations of other hedge funds continue, as the remnants and offshoots of the Rajaratnam investigation wend their way through the pipeline.”

Comment:

Yep. Now they’ve got a Sri Lankan, an Indian born dude, and a Russian, time to move along…nothing to see here.

In the Rajat Gupta case, the government was eventually forced to turn over Brady material to the defense, though the prosecutor did everything he could to delay from the arraignment in October 2011.

Nonetheless, the Brady disclosure was made only two months (February 2012) before the case went to trial (May 21, 2012). It sent a bill of particulars (specific charges) only at the end of March, less than two months before trial.

That is an incredibly short time for defense to prepare itself, when the government has had five years (2007-2012, if we include the prior SEC investigation) to prepare its case, when there are millions of documents including trading records, phone transcripts, board discussions, and financial analysis, covering scores, if not hundreds, of firms doing business with Galleon and Goldman, or involved tangentially in some other way. [Lila: Actually, a group Rajaratnam funded was raided for suspected ties to terrorism in 2006, so I suspect Big Raj had been under investigation even before that]

Besides the documents, there were 2000 wire-taps and scores of possible witnesses.

Yet, incredibly, a bill of particulars – list of specific charges – was sent to the defendant only at February, the end of March, all while the Galleon trial and tapes got replayed endlessly in the media.

Yet the DOJ is still bent on preventing Brady reform, which might make it easier for defendants to actually get access to the material in time to defend themselves.

Guest blogger Jon May in LawProfessors Blog points out:

“Fundamentally, the flaw in Mr. Cole’s testimony comes from the very examples he cites. Under the current system, witnesses are sometimes harmed. He fails to make a convincing case that either a broader standard or earlier disclosure will lead to an increased risk. And he ignores the fact that the proposed legislation provides for a protective order where the government can show a reasonable basis to believe that a required disclosure would lead to an effort to tamper with a witness. Similarly in claiming that the proposed legislation would undermine national security he fails to explain why the Classified Information Procedures Act is insufficient to protect our nation’s secrets. He just claims it is.

Mr. Cole also relies upon a statistical analysis that purports to show that serious allegations of government mishandling of Brady material has occurred in only a very small percentage of cases, less than three hundredth of one percent of the nearly 800,000 case brought in the last ten years. This is a significant argument because the burden is on the proponents of reform to demonstrate that there exists a problem that is in need of remedy. Mr. Cole’s analysis fails to take into consideration the fact that some 90% of the cases brought by the government result in pleas. Since there is no obligation to provide Brady material during plea negotiations such material is not provided unless the accused actually goes to trial. Mr. Cole’s statistical analysis also contains a built in bias since allegations of Brady violations are almost always evaluated under a harmless error standard. The upshot here is that regardless of the language of the Supreme Court’s decision in Kyles, circuit courts will rarely find a Brady violation absent a showing that the material withheld contributed to the jury’s verdict. Under such a standard, Mr. Coles can contend that reform is not needed since there has been no demonstration of systemic failure; systemic failure defined in such a way as to insure that no such showing could be made.

Finally, Mr. Cole contends that the government already provides greater discovery than is required by the law. Once again, there is no evidentiary support for this contention. While it may be DOJ policy that such evidence should be disclosed, because the law does not currently require such disclosure, prosecutors are under no legal obligation to actually apply DOJ guidelines and suffer no punishment when they fail to do so. Indeed, the current regime incentivizes prosecutors to evade Brady since prosecutors can enhance the odds of conviction through non-disclosure knowing that after a conviction appellate courts are loath to reverse.”

A Reuters piece on the grand-standing of Judge Rakoff in the Citigroup case, where he sided entirely with the SEC:

In its decision, a three-judge appeals court panel faulted Rakoff for appearing to overstep his authority, and for overlooking the possibility that Citigroup had done nothing wrong and would never have settled had it been required to admit liability.

Rakoff “believed it was a bad policy, which disserved the public interest, for the SEC to allow Citigroup to settle” without addressing the issue of liability, the 2nd Circuit panel said. “It is not, however, the proper function of federal courts to dictate policy to executive administrative agencies.”

The panel also said requiring an admission of liability might even hurt the public interest, because it “would in most cases undermine any chance for compromise.”

And:

“We agree to settlements when the terms reflect what we reasonably believe we could obtain if we prevailed at trial, without the risk of delay and uncertainty that comes with litigation,” said Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s enforcement chief. “Equally important, this settlement approach preserves resources that we can use to stop other frauds and protect other victims.”

In his biting November opinion, Rakoff said that approving a settlement without knowing the underlying facts was wrong. “An application of judicial power that does not rest on facts is worse than mindless, it is inherently dangerous,” he wrote.

The judge also called the $285 million payout, including restitution and a $95 million fine, “pocket change” for the third-largest U.S. bank, and said by settling the SEC appeared more interested in a “quick headline.”

CARTE BLANCHE

Lynn Stout, a professor at Cornell Law School, called the 2nd Circuit’s response “somewhat shocking.”

“The 2nd Circuit appears to be giving the SEC carte blanche in deciding what is in the public interest in settling cases against financial institutions,” she said. “This is especially troubling as the SEC is a party itself to the settlement.”

WeWereWallStreet:

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“Raj’s brother, Rengan Rajaratnam, in a taped conversation with Raj about another McKinsey consultant they were working to turn, made what we think was the comment that best summarizes the entire affair: “Scumbag. Everybody is a scumbag.”

The SEC’s original charges were brought in an administrative action, the sanctions of which don’t include a criminal conviction or jail time.  Gupta sued to move the case to federal court, claiming that the SEC’s action denied him his right to a jury trial.  Fair enough, but you’d think that someone who spent years selling strategy would be a smarter buyer when his lawyers were selling it to him.

Gupta’s trial is scheduled to begin in April and he’s no doubt spending millions on defense.  Even if he wins, those millions and an acquittal won’t help him get his reputation back or be welcomed back into his old circles. That’s how Greenspan said it would work. His peers have already convicted him, including his former partners at McKinsey, whose thousands of employees no more deserve to be tainted by a few bad apples than those of Arthur Andersen did back in 2002.

A better road out of the mess he got himself in would have been to apologize, admit to the SEC charges, and use the millions he’s spending on lawyers to buy mosquito nets in Africa or make non-profit micro loans in Indian villages. Both of those places need the money a lot more than high powered defense attorneys whose best outcome still won’t solve Gupta’s main problem. Everybody sins. How you handle being caught defines the line between redemption and recalcitrance.”

(Lila:  How can you be sure he sinned?)

Comment

This piece sums up my feelings well.  Gupta was sold a bad strategy by his lawyers. Naftalis might be a brilliant guy. But here are some things that make uneasy:

1. He’s old friends with Judge Rakoff and he couldn’t work out a way to get the hearsay excluded and the tapes of the leakers included?

2. He announces his defendant is going to take the stand, which is rarely done and which always leads to a conviction in insider cases, anyway. Then he turns around on Monday and says no. So as the prosecution and defense are winding up, the only thing playing in the media and in the jury’s mind is – this guy can’t face us on the stand.

How bad did that look? And why did Naftalis do that to him?

3. Instead of just accepting the SEC’s administrative hearing and taking whatever the deal the government had for him, which would have involved  no jail time or criminal conviction, he is facing major jail time.

Maybe he was so convinced he was being unfairly singled out. Maybe he knows he’s innocent, how can we be sure?

4. Now he also has a criminal conviction, after a brilliant and honorable career. He is a pariah.

5. According to some, the appeal is going to be very difficult. If Naftalis blew the defense, how is he going to succeed on the appeal?

6.  There are so many odd things, including Rakoff’s decision on keeping the defense’s evidence from the jury; his instruction to them on conspiracy; the speed of the decision; the media framing etc.

I have to ask the question. Is there something more going on….a bigger set up?

TWO QUESTIONS: When Lloyd Blankfein asked him to stay on in September 2008, was there something else going on?

Why did Blankfein go over and shake Raj Rajaratnam’s hand at his trial? It was unusual, and some said it showed how gracious he was.  Why did he do it? Was there something else? Did he and Big Raj cut some kind of deal and throw Gupta to the wolves?  What is Mark Schwartz’s relationship to Gupta? Why was Henry King to be protected? How do we know there wasn’t another call that day, on Sept 23?

Rakoff, Naftalis, Blankfein, Loeb, Bharara.

All from New York,  a city dominated by one industry.

If  Government Sachs and the Government decided to get together to stick the knife in this guy, do you think they’d get to influence the judge and…would a clever and unscrupulous defense lawyer also play his cards in the manner best suited to himself, rather than to his client?

Just puzzled and very saddened by this ominous case.  Something doesn’t feel right. It feels like a puppet show, whose outcome was already known before hand.