The Justice Department’s new fraud squad gathered federal prosecutors from across the South last month to announce “record fraud enforcement actions.” The lead U.S. attorney brought his case: a former federal employee convicted in 2022 of plundering a pandemic-era loan program for distressed small businesses. The defendant has already served his sentence. That is the squad’s record fraud: a reannouncement.
I have watched this movie since Nixon. The press conference is the work. The placard is the work. The regional U.S. attorneys line up like a wedding party. The prosecutions arrive later, if at all, and almost never land on the names that built the fraud. The squad has been on the job long enough that it is already losing staff and stalling investigations, and short enough on the calendar that it has produced no fresh conviction of any defendant who had not already served. The unit’s own memo lists its priorities — trade violations included. The binder does not explain what trade has to do with the small-business-loan case the Mississippi prosecutor actually brought. The prosecution is the ribbon.
Not the bankers who sold the mortgages, the executives who signed the leases, the platform chiefs who opened the spigots — the recitation of convictions already on the books, staged as fresh work. The sentencing was the work of some prior administration. The Justice Department showed up to claim the trophy.
Run the ledger.
HSBC, 2012: admitted laundering cartel money for the Sinaloa organization and moving sanctioned cash for Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, Burma. Paid $1.9 billion in a deferred-prosecution agreement. Zero individuals charged. Senator Grassley called the deal what it was: HSBC had “quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card.” The bank keeps banking.
Wells Fargo, 2020: settled for $3 billion over the fake-accounts scandal — the agreement was reached “with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud.” Ex-CEO John Stumpf paid $17.5 million and accepted a lifetime banking-industry ban, after Wells Fargo had already clawed back roughly $69 million of his compensation on its way out the door. The quota-pressed operators who wrote the scripts and signed the cards went home with the W-2s the bank had already paid.
The Sacklers extracted roughly $11 billion from Purdue Pharma while the company pleaded guilty in 2007 and again in 2020 to OxyContin-related charges. The family itself was never criminally charged. The 2025 bankruptcy settlement reached $7.4 billion — of which roughly $850 million was set aside for individual victims, payable over fifteen years.
A unit built to chase small fish will catch small fish. A unit built to write press releases will write press releases. The fine is the cost of doing business; the press release is the product; the prison cell is reserved for the man in northern Mississippi who got caught in 2022 and is home by now.
The S&L contrast, since this administration fancies the comparison. Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to taxpayers and roughly $250 million to some 23,000 mostly elderly bondholders. Asked whether the roughly $1.3 million he spread among five U.S. senators had bought influence, Keating said: “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I hope so.” He served about four and a half years before his convictions were overturned on a technicality in 1996, then pleaded guilty in 1999. The executives who ran the savings-and-loan crisis went to prison. None of the executives who ran the 2008 crisis did meaningful time. The unit that prosecuted the former is the kind of unit that prosecutes. The unit that did not prosecute the latter is the kind that announces.
When the Senate wanted to move against a looted hospital chain — Steward Health Care, bought by Cerberus, bankrupted in May 2024 at some $9 billion in debt — it voted in September 2024 to hold the CEO in criminal contempt. The Senate’s first such vote in over fifty years. The Senate moved. The Justice Department did not.
The class the squad is supposed to chase is the class the squad does not touch. The only thing this unit delivers on time is somebody else’s conviction.