More on Mary Jo White. [View all]

[hay rick]

In February of 2012, White appeared on a panel with Lanny Breuer and Eliot Spitzer. The subject was Financial Crisis Prosecutions. The discussion was moderated by Neil Barofsky, author of "Bailout" and former TARP Inspector General. Times article: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/a-star-panel-debates-financial-crisis-prosecutions/

White's contributions as detailed in the article:

Ms. White, the former prosecutor-cum-defense lawyer, echoed the note of caution.

“We must distinguish what is criminal from what is reckless behavior or bad business decisions and not bow to the frenzy,” Ms. White said. “And I worry the frenzy overrides reason and judgment sometimes.”
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“The concern is that they announce the task force and there will be cases,” she said. “It gets back to my frenzy concern. You don’t want that in the system – that kind of pressure. You don’t want the search for scalps to be the metric for success. Politics doesn’t belong in this space at all, but it still is in the space.”

Her biography as listed on her current employer's website: http://www.debevoise.com/attorneys/detail.aspx?id=26af1fa8-0acf-4ef5-9c3b-1f08b1aa7de0&type=showfullbio

Her practice as described by her employer:

Ms. White’s practice concentrates on internal investigations and defense of companies and individuals accused by the government of involvement in white collar corporate crime or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and civil securities law violations, and on other major business litigation disputes and crises. For her criminal work, she leads a Debevoise team that includes eleven former Assistant U.S. Attorneys with extensive experience in major commercial investigations and prosecutions.

From the Fiscal Times (and quoted verbatim in Forbes): http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/01/24/10-Secrets-About-Wall-Streets-New-Top-Cop.aspx#page1

Their list of things you need to know about Mary Jo White:

1.) Even George W. Bush liked her – Bill Clinton named White as the U.S. attorney in 1993, but the Bush administration asked her to remain at the post for an extra year. She stayed nine years in the post, after having worked as an assistant attorney in the Manhattan-based district from 1978 to 1981 and again from 1990 to 1993.
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3.) Her husband is an SEC insider – John White served as the commission’s director of corporate finance from 2006 to 2008. As a partner at the firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, he co-authored an article in December noting that the implementation of new rules regulating derivatives “may be delayed.”

4.) Lots of other Wall Street connections – She served on the board of directors for the Nasdaq stock exchange. In her current job at as a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, she defended former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis on charges of civil security fraud.
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8.) In 2002, she worried about the government arresting too many top executives – “Arresting executives is a way that the government tries to prove it means what it says in terms of cracking down,” White told The New York Times in 2002. “The danger, of course -- and it's a significant one -- is overkill, sweeping into the prosecutorial frenzy people who should not be charged.”

From Huffpo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/mary-jo-white_n_2545540.html

After she returned in 2002 to Debevoise & Plimpton, the law firm where she worked early in her career, White put together one of the best teams of white-collar lawyers in the country. In recent years, the firm has often defended those accused of wrongdoing during the financial crisis.

As an experienced litigator with deep knowledge of law enforcement, White, who has her own spokesman at Debevoise, is often sought out by reporters for her views on financial crime. In Interviews, she has characterized of the origins of the financial crisis in ways that put her at odds with many financial reform advocates who have pushed the Obama administration to bring more cases against bank executives. Its possible those views could complicate her selection to head the SEC.

"The financial crisis was so expensive and so many people were injured that one's instinct is to think that there must have been massive wrongdoing from the top on down," she told The Huffington Post in September. But criminal cases must be built on compelling evidence, not suppositions, and evidence of broad-based misconduct that would rise to that level doesn't exist, White said. She made similar statements on behalf of clients.

"Some have looked to assign blame for every aspect of the financial crisis, even where there is no evidence of misconduct," she wrote in a motion defending Bank of America's Lewis in 2010. She referred to then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's charges against the former bank chief as "a badly misguided decision without support in the facts or the law."

The media is focusing a lot of attention on Ms. White's prosecutions of John Gotti and Ramzi Yousef. She also gets credit for her white-collar crime and securities fraud prosecutions when she was U. S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York. One article here: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202585573175&thepage=1

From the article:

During an interview on leaving the Southern District in 2002, White said she was proud that her office tripled the number of securities fraud indictments as part of what she called "an effort to get at the more systematic problems."

White put pressure on major Wall Street firms, holding companies responsible for the actions of low-level employees or charging a company criminally.

Among noteworthy prosecutions during her tenure were the investigation of Bennett Funding Group executive Patrick R. Bennett, who bilked investors out of almost $700 million and the indictment against the Daiwa Bank of Japan, which was accused of hiding over $1 billion in trading losses. The bank was forced to close up shop in the United States.

Credit needs to be given where credit is due. On the other hand, given her more recent experience as a protector of Wall Street firms and her recent statements eschewing any rush to judgment, it is difficult to imagine Wall Street's tycoons shaking in their shoes at the prospect of Mary Jo White running the SEC.

Recent threads on Mary Jo White:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251280068
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101653990