A week after he parted ways with Greenwald and Co.’s First Look Media, Matt Taibbi has re-emerged at Rolling Stone with a scathing story about Alayne Fleischmann, a former JPMorgan Chase securities lawyer who tried to blow the whistle on “massive criminal securities fraud” by the bank and Jamie ‘That’s Why I’m Richer Than You’ Dimon, only to have the government try to silence her with a $9 billion settlement.
In the piece – reportedly, originally intended to launch First Look’s digital magazine Racket – Fleischmann breaks her confidentiality agreement to detail what Taibbi calls “one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history.” Taibbi describes Chase’s “rotten dog-meat loans,” their resulting “theft on a scale that blows the mind,” and, once Fleischmann tried to act to expose it all, the way she was blocked at every turn – by so-called regulators at the SEC, a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and finally by a Justice Department cover-up through a series of cash-for-secrecy settlement deals.
Taibbi’s bitter conclusion: The idea that Attorney General Eric Holder cracked down on Chase was “a carefully contrived fiction.” A powerful, infuriating read.
