Frank Franklin II/Associated PressAttorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke to about 400 Columbia University students and faculty members on Thursday.Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. defended the Justice Department’s record on financial fraud Thursday evening, asserting that the administration’s “record of success has been nothing less than historic.”
In a speech at Columbia University, Mr. Holder said, “From securities, bank and investment fraud to mortgage, consumer and health care fraud — we’ve found that these schemes are as diverse as the imaginations of those who perpetrate them, and as sophisticated as modern technology will permit.”
Mr. Holder’s remarks were among his first public comments since President Obama, during last month’s State of the Union address, announced the administration’s redoubled commitment to combat financial fraud.
Critics have faulted the Justice Department for not pursuing criminal cases against the banking executives whose conduct helped bring about the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent deep recession.
Mr. Holder, who spoke to about 400 Columbia students and faculty, addressed those criticisms on Thursday.
“We found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible,” said Mr. Holder, who earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Columbia. “But we have also discovered that some of this behavior — while morally reprehensible — may not necessarily have been criminal.”
“Believe me, I understand — and I often hear about — the public desire to, as one pundit put it, ‘see the handcuffs come to Wall Street,’ ” he said. “So let me assure you: whenever and wherever we do uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we will not hesitate to bring prosecutions.”
Mr. Holder said that in the last two years the department had indicted more than 2,100 people for mortgage fraud.”
But the Justice Department has recently experienced some setbacks in white-collar prosecutions that went unmentioned on Thursday.
This week, the government dropped its biggest prosecution of individuals accused of foreign bribery after failing to secure convictions of 10 of the 22 people charged. The two-year-old case, brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, was the result of an undercover sting carried out by the F.B.I. in which agents posed as African officials to solicit bribes from United States arms industry executives.
Last week, a federal appeals court overturned the criminal conviction of a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer on charges that he stole trade secrets from the bank when he downloaded source code from Goldman’s computers. The ruling was a setback for the Justice Department, which has made the prosecution of high-tech crime and intellectual property theft a priority.
That case was brought by Preet S. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Bharara attended Mr. Holder’s speech on Thursday, along with the United States attorneys from Connecticut, New Jersey and the Eastern District of New York.
Mr. Holder teased Mr. Bharara, who has led the government’s prosecution of insider-trading crimes on Wall Street, about his becoming a media darling.
“Many of you know Preet from his appearance on the cover of Time magazine and his being called ‘the man who is busting Wall Street,’ ” Mr. Holder said, holding up a copy of the recent issue for the audience.
“He will be signing copies in the back.”
Mr. Holder used the speech to trumpet the newly formed law enforcement group that is investigating financial fraud related to the housing boom and its subsequent collapse. He cited the task force’s issuance of civil subpoenas to 11 financial companies seeking information related to residential mortgage-backed securities.
“And, although I can’t go into detail about ongoing investigations, I can tell you that we expect more to follow,” Mr. Holder said.
In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia and a legal scholar, changed the subject to affirmative action. Mr. Bollinger, as the president of University of Michigan, was at the center of two Supreme Court cases regarding the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
Mr. Bollinger asked Mr. Holder to comment on the Supreme Court’s decision this week to revisit affirmative action by agreeing to hear a case involving race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas.
“I’m not sure what’s changed since Grutter,” Mr. Holder said, referring to a 2003 case in which Mr. Bollinger, as Michigan’s president, was the named defendant and the court ruled that the university’s affirmative action policies were constitutional.
Legal experts think that the court, whose makeup has changed since 2003, could do away with racial preferences in college admissions.
Mr. Holder noted that Mr. Bollinger had called the court’s decision to hear the case “ominous.”
“I don’t think that’s an inappropriate description,” he said.
Mr. Holder said he hoped that promoting diverse student bodies remained a factor in university admissions. “I can’t imagine a time where the need for diversity will ever cease,” he said.