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"For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa  drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years - people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.
"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

the Obama administration's targeted killings policy, even in cases of American citizens who may be on U.S. soil, in some situations where they are planning an imminent attack on the country.

  Here's an unexpected addition to the long list of people who say large banks may be too large to prosecute: Attorney General Eric Holder...

    Mr. Holder defended his agency's track record in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he conceded that the economic impact of a conviction could be so significant that cases are difficult to pursue.

    "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them," Mr. Holder told lawmakers. Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem 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. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

I guess now we know why that was Lanny Breuer's justification - it came from the top.

From Reuters, via DS Wright at FDL:

   While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers...

    A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

    Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

I mean, really - who was piddly little Aaron Swartz compared to these mega-banks for whom Holder and Breuer had done significant work and been, presumably, well-rewarded for their efforts?