By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 18, 2024 ~
Last week President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Jay Clayton to become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York – the regional office of the U.S. Department of Justice that brings (or passes on bringing) criminal prosecutions against the Wall Street megabanks for their serial looting of the American people.
In Trump’s first term as President, Clayton was tapped by Trump to serve as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission – notwithstanding that Clayton had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks in the prior three years as a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the oldest Wall Street go-to law firms. Clayton returned to Sullivan & Cromwell after his stint at the SEC and currently serves there as Senior Policy Advisor and Of Counsel.
When Clayton’s name was first announced by Trump to be SEC Chair in early January 2017, Senator Sherrod Brown, then the Democrat’s ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, issued the following statement:
“It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder.’ I look forward to hearing how Mr. Clayton will protect retirees and savers from being exploited, demand real accountability from the financial institutions the SEC oversees, and work to prevent another financial crisis.”
Our Revolution, the organization created by supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders after his failed bid for the Presidency, ramped up the heat against Clayton serving as SEC Chair with an email blast asking Sanders’ supporters to sign a petition against Clayton. The email message read in part:
“Clayton’s ties to Wall Street are deep. His law firm specializes in protecting Wall Street banks, and during the financial crisis he worked as a bailout attorney for Goldman Sachs, where his wife works today…The SEC chair is supposed to referee Wall Street banks, but Clayton has spent his entire career protecting their interests – and more than half of his family income currently comes from one of them. How can he be trusted to suddenly switch sides and put working Americans first?”
The link to the petition called this a “hostile takeover” of America. That hostile takeover now looks like a warm, cuddly blanket compared to what Trump is unleashing today. Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson, playing Trump, described his cabinet picks as follows: “…I am very fastly picking the most epic cabinet of all time. They’re some of the most dynamic, free-thinking, animal killing, sexually criminal, medically crazy people in the country.” Saturday Night Live forgot to reference Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the man Trump has nominated to be Secretary of Defense and head the U.S. military and Pentagon, despite his tattoos espousing white supremacy rhetoric.
Most notable about the current Trump nomination of Clayton is that this is not the first time that Trump has attempted to put this deeply conflicted man – who has zero experience as a criminal prosecutor – in charge of the federal prosecutor’s office that handles criminal prosecutions of Wall Street. The first time was more of an attempted coup d’état rather than an appointment. Here are the hubristic details of what went down with Clayton in Trump’s last year in office as President – six months before Trump fueled the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on June 19, 2020, the then U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, blindsided prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with the announcement that their boss, Geoffrey Berman, was stepping down as U.S. Attorney and would be replaced with the sitting SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton.
What Barr had not foreseen was that Berman had no intention of being ousted quietly. In fact, he would later write a tell-all book on the experience. Berman writes the following in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department:
“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
Two hours after Barr’s announcement, Geoffrey Berman released his own statement indicating that the U.S. Attorney General had just told a brazen lie to the American people. Berman’s statement was this: “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.”
The next day, Barr issued another statement indicating that President Trump was removing Berman from his post but would leave Berman’s Deputy in charge of the office on an interim basis. Barr had stated the prior Friday evening that he would be putting in Craig Carpenito, the sitting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, as acting head of the office until Clayton’s confirmation hearing. The acknowledgement by Barr that Berman’s Deputy would fill the post until a confirmation occurred appeased Berman and he agreed to step down.
The same day, then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, released a statement indicating that he would not move forward on Clayton’s nomination without the standard policy of getting a go-ahead from the two Senators of the state where the new U.S. Attorney will serve, i.e., New York. That meant that Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand would have to give the greenlight to Clayton. Instead, Schumer released the following statement:
“Forty seven years ago, Elliott Richardson had the courage to say no to a gross abuse of presidential power. Jay Clayton has a similar choice today: He can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration, and save his own reputation from overnight ruin.”
According to the New York Times, Senator Gillibrand had also stated that Clayton should withdraw his name from consideration.
That was the end of the Trump-Barr-Clayton attempted coup d’état on June 19, 2020. It was followed by the violent and deadly attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol building.
Now Trump’s plan to install Clayton in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is back and, incredibly, Clayton looks like one of the more reasonable Trump cabinet picks – on the mere basis that he hasn’t been accused of sexually assaulting anyone or having his body decorated with white supremacy images.
What Trump is attempting to do for Wall Street’s serial miscreants today is precisely what he is planning to do for himself at Main Justice – the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Trump has nominated his sycophant, Matt Gaetz, to be U.S. Attorney General and his defense counsel, Todd Blanche, to be Deputy Attorney General, a position that oversees the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Blanche represented Trump in the federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and in the New York case where Trump was accused of attempting to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, who testified in court that the two had sex in a hotel room. According to Daniels’ statements to the media, Trump’s wife, Melania, was caring for their four-month old son, Barron, at the time. The hush money trial ended with Trump being convicted on all 34 criminal felony counts – making him the first convicted felon in U.S. history to be elected President of the United States.
In the 2020 effort by Trump to install Clayton, mainstream media focused on the fact that the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District was actively investigating Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani, and Deutsche Bank, a major financial lender to Trump’s companies. That might have been relevant. But also noteworthy was the ongoing criminal investigations of two Wall Street megabanks.
Goldman Sachs was under investigation in one of the biggest financial frauds in history – a case involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB. Goldman raised over $6 billion in bond offerings for 1MDB but, according to the Justice Department, $4.5 billion of that was “misappropriated” and used “to fund the co-conspirators’ lavish lifestyles, including purchases of artwork and jewelry, the acquisition of luxury real estate and luxury yachts, the payment of gambling expenses, and the hiring of musicians and celebrities to attend parties.” Goldman made more than $600 million in fees from the bond offerings, according to the Justice Department.
On June 6, 2020 Reuters reported that Malaysia would not accept $3 billion from Goldman to settle the case. On June 11 – just eight days before Berman was abruptly dismissed from his post — the New York Times reported the following:
“Goldman Sachs is trying to get federal prosecutors to ease up on the bank for its role in a brazen scheme to loot billions of dollars from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.
“Lawyers for the bank have asked Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to review demands by some federal prosecutors that Goldman pay more than $2 billion in fines and plead guilty to a felony charge, according to three people briefed on the matter.
“The bank has sought to pay a lower fine and avoid a guilty plea, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are continuing.”
What most Americans have never heard about in this famous case is that Clayton’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was involved in making some of those luxury purchases on behalf of the gang of alleged criminals who looted 1MDB, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sullivan & Cromwell’s name makes seven appearances in the criminal complaint filed in court by the Justice Department.
While Sullivan & Cromwell is named 7 times in the complaint, the giant law firm Shearman & Sterling is mentioned 94 times. Shearman & Sterling has represented Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks on numerous occasions.
Something else that the public does not know is that a unit of JPMorgan Chase, a bank that has pleaded guilty to five criminal felony counts, is named 61 times in the 1MDB complaint for its role in wiring the looted funds. While the Justice Department did not bring charges against J.P. Morgan in the matter, the Swiss regulator, FINMA, found in 2017 that the bank had committed serious anti-money laundering breaches in its handling of monies belonging to 1MDB.
Just three months after the attempted Clayton coup, the U.S. Department of Justice gave JPMorgan Chase a deferred prosecution agreement for two criminal felony counts involving sprawling crimes in the trading of precious metals and U.S. Treasuries. But instead of the case being brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York – where JPMorgan’s trading desks are located – the case was inexplicably handled by the District of Connecticut.
