Executives at JP Morgan Chase may finally be indicted over their role in the mortgage crisis. Not for throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes, mind you, but for misrepresenting the value of the loans that ultimately led to those evictions to their investors.
Justice Department lawyers have been quietly trying to build a criminal case against J.P. Morgan for the past year-and-a-half. In 2012, an Obama administration-created task force began issuing a series of subpoenas to various financial institutions, seeking internal documents about their handling of residential mortgage-backed securities...
Among them... was an email from a bank employee, warning her superiors they were vastly overstating the quality of the mortgages being bundled into securities. The bank went ahead and securitized them anyway, according to these people...
Her cooperation, along with documents, has fueled confidence among some lawyers within the Justice Department that they have built a solid, prosecutable case built on hard evidence.
Now it all becomes clear - the bizarre and otherwise ruinous behavior of Republicans in Congress. Could it be that they are being paid off by JP Morgan Chase to shut down the Federal Government for a week while Chase bank executives prepare a quick exit from the country a la Snowden? After all, they cleverly kept the air traffic controllers on the job...