Matt Taibbi, Eliot Spitzer on Eric Holder's failure

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

Got a chance to talk with Eliot Spitzer last night about Eric Holder's decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs for the offenses laid out in the Levin report.

I was trying not to be too obvious in making the point that Spitzer is an example of the kind of guy you would want looking at that Goldman case. Not only did I not want to look like a suck-up, but I wasn't sure how, "As you know, Eliot, a prosecutor is supposed to be kind of a dick!" would go over. Because I would have meant it in the most complimentary way possible. And it has nothing to do with politics. If you read James Stewart's Den of Thieves you can see that Rudy Giuliani had some of the same key qualities. A good prosecutor should look down the barrel of a bunch of millionaire lawyers at Davis Polk or White and Case and feel turned on by the challenge of combat. Making a deal with any devil should burn him at the core, keep him awake at night.

But that's exactly who Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer haven't been, exactly who Bob Khuzami at the SEC hasn't been. Instead of being fighters, they've been dealmakers and plea-bargainers. They've dealt out every major financial scandal, from Abacus to the Muni-bid-rigging cases (they prosecuted a few low-level guys at GE but let the big players at the big banks skate) to the Citigroup fraud settlement that was so bad a judge threw it back at the govenment's face. In that latter case, amazingly, the govenment is now fighting not for its constituents, but for its right to give out crappy deals to repeat-offender banks without judicial review.