Attorney General Eric Holder wants a Wall Street scalp.
After years of pressure from some lawmakers, civic leaders and Occupy Wall Street protesters, the country’s No. 1 law enforcer said Tuesday he has instructed many of his 93 federal prosecutors to review any residential mortgage fraud case they have brought against a financial institution stemming from the 2008 financial crisis to see if any executive could be held accountable for the company’s actions.
Both civil and criminal cases will be on the table, Holder said.
The prosecutors have been given three months to report their findings to Washington.
Holder, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, asked the prosecutors “to try to develop cases against individuals and to report back in 90 days with regard to whether they think they can successfully bring criminal or civil cases against those individuals.”
The Bronx-born AG, who is stepping down from the post he’s held since 2009, said Loretta Lynch, who has been nominated to replace him, will likely get those responses.
Holder’s move was met with instant derision from three former federal prosecutors, who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity.
It’s a political play to give Lynch a clean slate if the Senate confirms her — as well as a tacit admission that billion-dollar fines and guilty pleas haven’t had the deterrent effect the Department of Justice was hoping for, the former prosecutors said.
“It’s a little bit unseemly,” one former prosecutor told The Post.
If prosecutors really thought they had something on an executive, they would have “done something already,” a second former prosecutor said.
Holder, 64, has cultivated a mixed record in his approach to Wall Street.
While he was the author of a 1999 memo that cautioned US lawyers against extracting guilty pleas from banks, he said last year that no financial institution was “too big to jail.”
At the same time, he has secured about $40 billion in mortgage-fraud probe settlements from the country’s largest banks.
Holder’s request to review all residential mortgage fraud cases comes after President Obama in 2012 formed a task force to probe misconduct that contributed to the financial crisis.
Despite numerous probes, no high-ranking bank executive has been found to have committed a crime.
But the search will go on for at least another 90 days.
“We have this ongoing examination of whether individual cases ought to be brought,” Holder said Tuesday. “To the extent that individuals have not been prosecuted, people should understand it is not for lack of trying.”
If the 90-day reviews end up catching bankers, don’t expect a CEO to be among them, one former prosecutor advised.
Another factor to consider: While Justice is keeping its options open, it’s more likely that it would approach a civil case through the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act — a 1989 law that has a lower threshold and a 10-year statute of limitations — rather than tougher criminal laws, the lawyers said.