“Lanny Breuer is returning to Covington & Burling.
At Covington, the controversial former chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division will head one of the top corporate criminal defense practices in the city.
As chief of the Criminal Division, Breuer had to face down politicians, reporters and public interest activists who wanted to know why no major financial institution or executive from a major financial institution has been criminally prosecuted since the financial crisis.
These confrontations resulted in two high profile television news documentaries — one that ran on CBS News 60 Minutes in December 2011 titled Prosecuting Wall Street — and another that ran in January 2013 on PBS’s Frontline titled The Untouchables.
The controversy over how the Justice Department prosecutes — or doesn’t prosecute — major corporations will be the subject of a May 3 conference at the National Press Club titled – Neither Admit Nor Deny: Corporate Crime in the Age of Deferred Prosecutions, Consent Decrees, Whistleblowers and Monitors.
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Criticism of Breuer’s exit through the revolving door came quickly from Dennis Kelleher, a former partner at Skadden Arps in Washington, D.C., and currently president of the public interest group Better Markets.
Kelleher told Corporate Crime Reporter that “nothing is more corrosive to the American people’s trust in government than the revolving door where too many officials turn their so-called public service into multi-million dollar riches unimaginable to most Americans.”
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Read full Corporate Crime Reporter article here