How Attorney General Eric Holder Colluded With Bank Of America To Destroy Wikileaks And Silence Unfriendly Journalists, Including Glenn Greenwald
Note: This story was published by Wikileaks via Twitter to their 800,000 followers.
In light of the Assange speech this weekend, we are reposting several Wikileaks stories.
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When we wrote a few weeks ago about Eric Holder, Wikileaks and Bank of America, we focused on the irony of the U.S. Attorney General threatening to prosecute an organization (Wikileaks) that possibly holds the very information on which he might draw up his very first indictment of a major bank or Wall Street executive.
Why hasn't Eric Holder asked to see the evidence, which Wikileaks claims to have, that executives at one of our largest banks may have committed serious crimes?
Let's be honest, Holder doesn't really give a rip about financial crimes, but the media should at least be asking him why he doesn't want to see the evidence. We know he'd love to get his hands on Julian Assange's hard drive -- why doesn't he want to see Brian Moynihan's (or Ken Lewis's)?
For some reason, Holder and the rest of the Obama administration would rather endanger our Constitutional rights to due process and a free press by persecuting journalists on specious charges, than to actually do their job and enforce the law.
These are valid questions -- ones for which we really didn't have good answers other than the usual corruption, cowardice and ineptitude when it comes to prosecuting large financial institutions.
However, new information has surfaced that shines a whole new light on the situation. By now, most of you have heard about Bank of America's plans to go after Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald. Until they were caught, Bank of America was working with a group of law and cyber security firms to draw up plans for destroying Wikileaks, the hacker group Anonymous, as well as Wikileaks supporters in the media (like Greenwald). The slide here is from a presentation by one of the firms involved:
It is unclear exactly how they were going to pull it off, but part of the plan was to dig up information with which to blackmail or extort journalists, including Greenwald, into choosing between their open support for Wikileaks and their "professional preservation." You can read all the sordid details of this episode here, here and here.
But one bit of information has been largely overlooked:
- It was the Department of Justice who first put Bank of America in contact with the anti-Wikileaks hit team at the center of the scandal.
Ironically, the hacker group Anonymous turned the tables on Bank of America's hit team and captured a cache of emails that all but prove the Justice Department's direct involvement. Here is an email from one of the firms, admitting that it was the Department of Justice that set the ball rolling:
If the screen shot is difficult to read, here is the relevant excerpt from the email:
Here is the summary of my call:
They are pitching the bank to retain them for an internal investigation around wikileaks. They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data. DOJ called the GC [general counsel] of BofA and told them to hire Hunton and Williams, specifically to hire Richard Wyatt who I'm beginning to think is the emperor. They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak. Currently they are recommending:
-Hire H&W as outside council on retainer
-Use Palantir for network/cyber/insider threat investigation
-Use Berico/HBGary to analyze wikileaks the organization (people, history, where they are located) Apparently if they can show that wikileaks is hosting data in certain countries it will make prosecution easier.
-Use a team of GD/PWC forensics investigators.
They have a half hour with the GC of the 3rd largest bank in the world [i.e. Bank of America] to plead their case.
There are two very troubling things about this very candid email from Matthew Steckman of Palantir, a data analysis firm, to Aaron Barr of cyber security firm HB Gary. First, as we've highlighted in the screen shot above ("DOJ called the GC of BofA and told them to hire Hunton and Williams"), the Department of Justice told Bank of America to get in touch with law firm Hunton & Williams, who would then assemble the hit team to take care of their Wikileaks problem. This likely has attorney-client privilege advantages, in addition to being downright corrupt.
But the second troubling thing about this email is that part of the plan is to have these private firms, possibly under the cloak of attorney-client privilege, dig up information to quote "make prosecution easier." So not only was Eric Holder neglecting to investigate Bank of America for any crimes they may have committed, and not only was he helping Bank of America assemble a team of cyber hitmen to take out Wikileaks, but it now appears he was also using a private group of hackers and cyber-sleuths to do the kind of information gathering that is illegal for the Department of Justice to do on its own.
The corruption here runs so deep, on so many levels, it's almost impossible to comprehend. How is it that a failed, bailed out bank can have so much power and influence that the U.S. Attorney General is colluding with them to engage in acts, including extortion, blackmail and Fourth Amendment violations, which are almost certainly illegal?
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Background...
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Bank Of America, Wikileaks And Eric Holder - What The U.S. Attorney General Doesn't Want You To Know
Aug 20, 2012 at 11:53 AM
Reader Comments (29)
http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/02/15/glenn-greenwald-on-radio-free-dylan-3/
“I’m considering all possible options” of fighting back
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1361334/Googles-email-service-wipes-entire-accounts-150-000-Gmail-users.html#ixzz1FHC2bVes
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2011/0228/1224291011457.html
Someone at the Oscars last night (I dont know who) expressed his feelings towards the criminals that created this mortgage mess and the fact that none of them are in jail. He was right on!! Did anyone see this???
Angelo Mozilo is prime example of this. He should be in jail right now. what is wrong with our damn justice system????????????
That was Charles Ferguson, director of Inside Job. We've got the video coming up...
yes, i havnt seen the movie but i have heard its very good. this needs much more attention. Thank you for all your work you are a great asset here.
throw the mortgage mess CEOS in jail NOW!!!!
I guess his word doesn't mean much, if he lied while taking the oath.
"It is not possible," I told myself, "for you to be shocked any longer. Your cynicism has burnt you to a husk, with no live tissue left. Does it hurt when they tap on the root-canaled chompers? Of course not."
I come after lunch to this post. What's this? I am... schocked!!!
I AM SO UPSET AND ANGERED AND FRIGHTENED BY THIS I CAN BARELY TYPE!!!
However, when the rage hits worst, it's time to think. So I went back and read those materials, and what hit me between the eye's like Col. Kurtz's diamond bullet was this:
"established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause."
Change "most" to "damn near all" and you have the truth about what is happening to this country, and it's not pretty.
You're a lawyer. You might understand some of the docs better than i do. Hunton and Williams is the law firm, some guy named Woods was the lead contact it seems. Search either "hunton" or "woods" and you can find most of the emails they were involved in. Really weird stuff.
Some of them reveal that HB Gary had worked for Citi, Morgan Stanley and the Fed. In fact, on meeting they had late last year appeared to be with both Citi and the Fed -- at the same time? Plus, when they were discussing Morgan Stanley, they noted that MS "talked" to Citi and both firms knew the other was working with HB Gary, so it's just a den of snakes up there in NYC.
Oh, here's the searchc page with the cache of emails:
http://search.hbgary.anonleaks.ch/
http://www.reuters.com/news/video/story?videoId=190708864&videoChannel=5
Then read this.
Is "too big to fail" too big for Dodd-Frank?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/28/us-finance-summit-liquidate-idUSTRE71O6ED20110228?pageNumber=1
[snip]
EXPANSION PUSH
Some critics contend that JPMorgan and firms like it are aggressively expanding overseas with the goal of immunizing themselves from orderly liquidation by making it unworkable.
Dodd-Frank calls for international coordination by the FDIC on unwinding troubled firms. But the world is a long way from any kind of uniform orderly liquidation pact.
I know who Huntin and Gruntin is, a second tier law firm out of Richmond. That's not really the issue. The larger issues have been raised by DB here, who wants to know, among other things, why in the Sam Hill the DOJ has no interest whatsoever about BAC wrongdoing and has instead been enlisted as Ken Lewis' chimney sweep boy.
You might have noticed that an unmistakable majority of Americans, according to CBS, now favor those deadbeat Wisco unions.
People are pissed, and the usual TV nonsense is starting to appear, well, out of focus.
More and more it seems that folks wanna know same thing as me--what's a Wall Street banker really made of?
It's almost like the Administration , Congress, and all the regulatory agencies were voluntarily working together with Wall Street to defraud the American People. Possibly to protect investments that they, their relatives, and close associates had made or to cover up something even worse.
Could be if a big banker gets nailed he blows the whistle on everybody and a bunch of Congress and Administration crooks end up in Federal Prison along with the Wall Street parasites.
That the U.S. Attorney General may be violating the law to silence a source he should be encouraging to testify is absolutely mind boggling.
I wish Wilileaks would publish the BOFA material. For Holder and BOFA to be this twitterpated you can bet the s**t will hit the fan if it's published. If they don't do it soon they are probably going to be denied the ability to do so. Freedom of the press is apparently not so free anymore.
The BofA stuff is being kept under wraps because apparently Wikileaks doesn't know what the hell they've got. Assange has said as much, and I had been wondering as much for a while now. Maybe they've got nothing, but how the hell would they know? I would like to think they've already lined up some "media partners" like they did with the diplomatic cables, but who knows...
Chris Whalen would be ideal for this. As would any of the other blogging suspects.
http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/02/15/glenn-greenwald-on-radio-free-dylan-3/
Especially at about 30 mins into the interview, they start talking about how it is that Dylan even has a show on a mainstream network, how for people like Glenn and Dylan the "cause" becomes the career and how people like them are impossible to silence or pressure in the same way that Chuck Todd is.
Great stuff.
The game is over. They won.
Unless...
But nothing happens unless this site and others like it can leverage the rising tide that will hopefully move to another level with this movie. The fact that "no one seems's to care" is singularly behind no indictments and no sentences.
So if it walks like a piggy, talks like a piggy, by golly it’s a PIGGY!
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WHERE IS MY LOAN MODIFICATION BANK OF DESTROYING AMERICA!
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BofA and it’s CEO Brian Moynihan reminds me of that song by John Lennon and George Harrison titled "Piggies" I invite you to listen to this song on youtube and see if it appropriately fits.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD9rTzs2q4&feature=player_embedded
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Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt
And for all the little piggies
Life is getting worse
Always having dirt to play around in.
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Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to play around in.
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In their ties with all their backing
They don't care what goes on around
In their eyes there's something lacking
What they need's a damn good whacking.
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Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.
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When I filed my lawsuit against Bank of America, I thought of the many others out there in the same situation. It was then that we decided to educate the public on what these piggy banks are doing, as well as unite us all together as one voice. Please help me turn this David vs. Goliath modification process, into a Goliath vs. Goliath.
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Please stand with me and Brookstone Law Firm, and send an email to Bank of Abusing America that states that we will no longer tolerate their potentially illegal, fraudulent, irregular and abusive business methods.
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So please send your email directly to Bank of America and include the following:
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1. Your name
2. Your complaint concerning your experience with Bank of America.
3. Please end your email “I support John Wright vs. BofA Lawsuit!”
4. Please send a copy of your email to piggybankblog@earthlink.net
5. Please send your email to BofA CEO Brian Moynihan:
brian.t.moynihan@bankofamerica.com
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I HAVE HAD ENOUGH AND I AM FIGHTING BACK!
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I have created piggybankblog.com for all of those who have been abused by Bank of Destroying Americas potentially irregular, fraudulent and simply abusive home loan modification process.
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Divided we might have fell America. UNITED WE MUST STAND!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJMr7OJ0s
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My name is John Wright AND I AM FIGHTING BACK!
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John Wright
piggybankblog.com
The Act of Treason has become a concern..... Might I be charged with Treason in my knowingly paying a rough government taxes?
So best I can do is add this to my Federal Income Tax payment check:
"Do not cash without proper ID proof of a government that fully understands and fully upholds the founding documents of the United States re: Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Cashing otherwise constitutes an act of fraud by the bank."
With an added note in the memo space: "Not to be used of abusive and/or deceptive military industrial spending addiction."
To be clear. by the very words of the Declaration of Independence, it is not only the right of US citizens, but our DUTY to put off such rough government.