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Wall Street’s top regulator faced questions on Thursday about its defenses against cyber criminals after admitting hackers breached its electronic database of corporate announcements and may have used it for insider trading. The incursion at the Securities and Exchange Commission struck at the heart of the U.S. financial system. The SEC’s EDGAR filing system is the central repository for market-moving information on corporate America with millions of filings ranging from quarterly earnings to statements on acquisitions. Accessing documents before they are released publicly would offer hackers a lucrative opportunity to trade on that information. The SEC has said it was...

NEW YORK – Mary Jo White announced plans on Monday to step down as chair of the powerful Securities and Exchange Commission before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. White’s term at the helm of the SEC hadn’t been scheduled to expire until June 2019. Trump has promised to roll back the sweeping regulation of Wall Street that White has spent nearly four years trying to install. In fact, implementing Dodd-Frank rules and other financial reforms had been one of the biggest challenges during White’s tenure at the SEC.

Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 9:47 a.m. EDT 9/11 Commission Covered-up Gorelick Warning A 1995 memo from a top terrorism prosecutor warning that a directive by Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick "could cost lives" is being concealed by the 9/11 Commission. Compounding the cover-up - Gorelick herself was a prominent member of the Commission and refused to recuse herself from parts of the 9/11 investigation that covered the now notorious "wall" she erected that prevented intelligence and law enforcement agencies from cooperating in the war on terror. In June 1995, U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District Mary Jo...

The Obama administration is under increasing pressure to investigate allegations that Exxon Mobil Corp. misled the public about its knowledge of climate change. All of the Democratic candidates for president have called on the Justice Department to launch an investigation, joining a number of Dem lawmakers and major environmental groups. Some are also pushing for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to probe whether the company broke federal law. The pressure on the feds to act only intensified on Nov. 5 when it was revealed that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had launched his own probe. The allegations are...

Even at this late date in the presidential race, a few things stand out to those who have followed Hillary Clinton's career as a Marxist sympathizer and greedy politician/foreign policy Conan "The Destroyer" type. It is the refusal of the mainstream media and even some of the conservative media, to really dig into her past and even open actions to see things that would greatly disturb an honest, educated person, namely her accepting large amounts of money from Organized Crime and her relationship with a woman who gave all appearances of being a Cuban propaganda asset at the least, and...

Would corporations operate better if their board members were chosen so as to ensure that women and major racial/ethnic groups were all appropriately represented? Many social activists believe so and their thinking has penetrated into the federal regulatory agency that oversees our stock exchanges – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Back in 2009, the SEC instituted a requirement that publicly traded companies disclose plans they might have regarding the diversity of their boards of directors. That is to say, the racial, ethnic and gender characteristics of board members – as if those attributes were the essential, defining attributes of...

Almost 55 months after confessing felonious conduct, Teamster money-laundering scandal figure, Jere Nash, has finally been sentenced. U.S. Dist. Judge Thomas P. Griesa (S.D.N.Y., Nixon) sentenced Nash Apr. 9 to a mere two years probation for his role in a series of schemes which lead to the embezzlement of some $885,000 from the Int'l Bhd. of Teamsters' treasury and to $538,100 in illegal campaign contributions to the failed reelection campaign of expelled IBT president Ron Carey. The sentencing appears to have been hush hush: the four N.Y.C. major dailies and the two Washington, D.C., dailies apparently did not cover the...

The chief executive of General Electric raked in a $37.3 million pay package last year, a large sum by any standard. But how much larger was it than the average pay of the 305,000 employees who helped General Electric earn billions in profits that year? The industrial giant did not disclose that comparison, and corporate America rarely reveals how the compensation of the chief executive stacks up against that of the workers in the ranks below. That will soon change. After a long delay and plenty of pushback from corporations, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved in 3-2 vote on...

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014 "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Senate on Monday unanimously approved Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney who supervised the prosecution of New York mob boss John Gotti, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

An embattled former Obama administration appointee -- who was part of a group of attorneys accused of being terrorist sympathizers for defending "enemy combatants" -- has been hired for a post at the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn, officials confirmed today. Tali Farhadian was one of several private attorneys who created a rift between Republicans last spring when the Obama Administration assigned them to posts within the Justice Department. Although Farhadian was handling unrelated matters in Attorney General Eric Holder's office, a political watchdog group accused Obama of overloading the agency with officials sympathetic to enemy combatants. Their appointments even...

Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office? I'll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White's career, and focus only on the one incident...

Top brass flew to Baghdad with publicity-shy empowerment businessman Mzilikazi Wa Afrika, Jessica Bezuidenhout and Andre Jurgens Two of the ANC's most powerful officials travelled to Iraq with a controversial Johannesburg businessman just weeks before he landed a R1.2-billion state oil deal. Sandi Majali is one of about 270 people around the world who have been named in an alleged sanctions-busting scam involving oil from former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. The names appeared in Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation documents found after the fall of Saddam. Majali, 41, who heads the media-shy empowerment company Imvume Resources, has for the...

Mary Jo White, the former US Attorney that won convictions against the Blind Sheikh and his gang of radical Islamist terrorists in the first attack on the World Trade Center, writes that new Attorney General Michael Mukasey had it right when he refused to issue a blanket interpretation of waterboarding as illegal. She explains that Congress has not made it that simple, and that the Judiciary Committee unfairly placed the responsibility on the executive branch. White insists that no easy answers exist on interrogative techniques: The confirmation process rightly shed light on the issues of permissible interrogation methods and the...

With the resignation of a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, senior Democrats have stepped up their calls for the end of investigations into two prominent Senate Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) said the resignation of U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White from the Southern District of New York should mean an end to the separate probes into Sens. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). "It's time to move on," Daschle said Thursday, shortly after White's announcement. "It's time to bring it to a close, and perhaps this might serve as a catalyst to do just that." Since ...

<p>November 16, 2001 -- Mary Jo White said yesterday she's quitting as Manhattan U.S. attorney, and sources say Gov. Pataki is considering former Whitewater prosecutor Robert Ray to replace her.</p> <p>Sources say Pataki has backed away from Jim McGuire, his legislative counsel, as his first pick for the influential U.S. attorney job and is now leaning toward Ray, who replaced controversial Whitewater-Sexgate prosecutor Kenneth Starr.</p>

An Army intelligence officer yesterday publicly charged that the unit in which he worked had indeed identified two al Qaeda cells — and 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the terrorist attacks. Properly handled, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer says, that information might have prevented the terror attacks. And Shaffer insists that his unit, code-named Able Danger, provided that information to the 9/11 commission headed by former Gov. Tom Kean — which failed to include it in its final report. Moreover, the officer's revelations come as newly declassified documents show that State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration...

A very interesting memo from former US Attorney for Manhattan Mary Jo White apparently escaped being smuggled out of the National Archives in Sandy Burglar's pants. It turns out that White, who aggresively prosecutor terrorists responsible for the first WTC attack, told Jamie Gorelick that the infamous wall she built between intelligence and criminal justice would lead to disaster. "This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee. "The single biggest mistake we can make in...

...Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.... Justice honchos overruled White's plea— even though her team knew better than anyone else in law enforcement what the real risks were. White's team won a host of convictions — including Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. Equally troubling is that...

...Friday Kean & Co. said the operation was not considered "historically significant." But make no mistake: These facts are critical to a complete understanding of the conditions that permitted 9/11 to take place. Had the Pentagon information been passed along to the FBI, it's possible the terrorist attack would have succeeded nonetheless.... Either way, the orders preventing the passage of information surely didn't help. And, just as surely, their role in the story should have been recognized in the 9/11 Commission's official report. Equally disturbing is the possibility that the commission ignored the information to protect one of its own...