In his eight years as president, Barack Obama oversaw a civil rights renaissance, laid the groundwork for combating climate change, and shepherded the nation through its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
But his failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for causing the collapse of the housing market ushered in an era of populist rage that cleared the path for a demagogic reality-TV star to take the Oval Office, according to Jesse Eisinger’s new book, The Chickenshit Club, which hit shelves on Tuesday.
“If they had, the history of the country would be different,” Eisinger, a veteran financial reporter at ProPublica whose investigation on shady crisis-era Wall Street practices won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, told HuffPost by phone. “We would think of the financial crisis differently, think of the Obama administration differently; there would be a sense that the government was legitimate. There would be a sense of accountability after the crisis, the reforms would be tougher.”
He added: “I don’t think we would have Donald Trump as president.”
The book takes its name from an address then-U.S. Attorney James Comey gave in 2002 to a fresh-faced crop of elite Justice Department recruits. Before becoming the best-known FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover, Comey oversaw the Southern District of New York, a federal jurisdiction with domain over Wall Street. The district has long served as the premiere assignment for prosecuting corporate wrongdoing, with a magnetic attraction to some of the country’s most ambitious young legal minds. In the speech, Comey warned against joining the “chickenshit club” ― his shorthand for prosecutors who only pursue cases they’re almost certain to win. Justice, he argued, came of taking on violators for whom the system seems rigged, not picking off easy targets.
