Covering up Trump’s dealings with Michael Flynn & Turkey

April 3, 2017

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Ca.
Photo by Jesse Lintl (flickr)

By Allan Dodds Frank
Forget about the Russian investigation. It is the White House cover-up of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s criminal behavior that merits the full attention of the press, Congress and law enforcement.

The Flynn cover-up apparently was in full swing at the White House when Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Ca., brought his clown act to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to sprinkle the press with red herrings about surveillance of Trump Tower.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a 30-year-old who worked with Gen. Flynn at the Defense Intelligence Agency and was brought by him to the National Security Council as a “Senior Director for Intelligence Programs”, has now been identified by the New York Times as one of Nunes’s two sources inside the White House.

This is the same man who President Trump saved – after appeals from Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner – from being dismissed by his direct boss, National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. The CIA also had been pushing for Cohen-Watnick’s ouster, according to a March 14 story from Politico.

Soon, it should be clear that there was only one reason Cohen-Watnick was combing through classified intelligence about Trump Tower surveillance. He undoubtedly was scouring the intelligence to see what evidence the government “collected incidentally” about Flynn’s illegal lobbying for Turkey. Part of that surveillance may also have covered any efforts by Flynn to influence Trump – or his Attorney General in waiting – Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

The Flynn Intel Group’s belated registration as a Foreign Agent for Turkey revealed that his real purpose was trying to convince the U.S. government to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric in exile in Pennsylvania, to satisfy demands from Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
Flynn, who got a $600,000 contract from his Turkish patron, reportedly also discussed with senior Turkish government officials the possibility of spiriting Gulen out of the country without proper extradition proceedings.

That bit of news was reported by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted former CIA Director James Woolsey, a Trump supporter and Flynn Intel Group associate, who was at the meeting between Flynn and Turkish government officials. Woolsey was appalled by what amounted to a discussion of a potential kidnapping. Through his spokesman, Flynn has denied discussing “any illegal actions, nonjudicial physical removal or any other such activities.”

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, head of Defense Intelligence Agency. Dept of Defense photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo (2012)

So who do you believe? A former CIA Director or a rogue general who was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Obama and fired as National Security Advisor by President Trump three weeks after being appointed and before disclosing his need to register as a foreign agent for Turkey.

There also may have been some intercepts involving Flynn trying to discuss extraditing Gulen with Rex Tillerson or other candidates for Trump’s Secretary of State. According to wire reports, the Turkish Foreign Secretary raised the extradition matter with Tillerson this week and apparently complained about the federal criminal charges lodged recently in New York against the high-ranking Turkish banker. That defendant just happened to have added Trump confidante Rudolph Giuliani to his defense team.

The other possibility is that the surveillance also detected information relating to the Trump Organization’s business dealings in Turkey.
Given what the U.S. government already knew about Russian interference in the U.S. election, it would have been a huge abandonment of duty if U.S. intelligence agencies had failed to cover what was going on between foreign governments and the Trump campaign and its intelligence advisor Lt. Gen. Flynn.

Donald Trump: Press Siren, Silurian News, March 2016

Donald Trump: Press Siren

BY ALLAN DODDS FRANK

 Covering Donald Trump has always been a challenge.

The one aspect of his behavior that constantly tests reporters is that his credibility is always suspect. There is never a guarantee that anything he says or asserts can be taken as absolutely true. Being completely truthful is not and has apparently never been part of Trump’s modus operandi.

Thinking about the thousands of people I have interviewed during my four decades as a newspaper, magazine and television reporter, I am hard-pressed to think of anybody like him.

I have been following Trump and his business adventures since I first interviewed him 32 years ago for a story in Forbes.

His media savvy was apparent to all even then, long before he polished his close-ups for 14 years as a television game-show host. Unlike other executives who were terrified by reporters, Trump always relished publicity. And he knew that if an investigative reporter was sniffing around, the best way to understand the challenge and control the damage was to call the journalist back right away.

In 1984, he was a hyper-ambitious young developer active in local politics with a rich father and a burning desire to be more than a regional celebrity. His first big national play was his grand plan to drive the U.S. Football League to greatness and take a bite out of the National Football League.

My first interview with him – in his office at the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue – was cordial and only a little combative. But even then, it was obvious his relentless self-promotion generated waves of overstatements, exaggerations and misrepresentations. Fact-checking him clearly was going to be a nightmare.

As an owner of the New Jersey Generals, Trump had flashily signed some big stars, including running back Herschel Walker, who lent the new U.S.F.L. enough appeal to garner a $15 million contract from ESPN to broadcast football in the spring.

Some U.S.F.L. owners thought the league – by creating a bidding war – could stockpile enough talent to force the N.F.L. to create two or more new franchises in exchange for collapsing the U.S.F.L. and absorbing its star players. That deal – split among the U.S.F.L. owners – would have generated huge profits or even better: stakes in N.F.L. franchises that might now be worth more than $1 billion each.

Instead, Trump insisted on going to head-on war with the N.F.L. by moving the upstart league’s season to the fall. Here’s the rationale Trump gave Forbes: “I go first class. If you’re going to go first class, you need the television revenue generated by the fall and winter. It is as simple as that. The biggest obstacle we’ll have to moving is our own success.”

The antitrust suit against the N.F.L. that Trump promoted was actually won by the U.S.F.L. and the federal judge awarded $1 – 100 pennies – in damages. Led by Trump, the U.S.F.L. collapsed and the owners lost their investments.

Trump remained on my radar, and I would bump into him at events around town. Always eager to have a spot on the Forbes 400 rich list, he was all smiles when I encountered him at a reception he hosted at the 1988 Mike Tyson- Michael Spinks heavyweight title fight in Atlantic City. Many bankers eager to give him loans almost certainly were squeezed in the jazzed-up crowd close to the many models and friends of Marla Maples who were present.

I really resumed covering him in December 1989, a little more than a year after I had become the Business Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. Trump was then yearning to be a national figure, and getting front page attention from gossips Liz Smith and Cindy Adams about splitting with his wife Ivana.

When one of my bosses, Paul Friedman, the executive producer of “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings” asked me for story ideas, I told him I suspected Donald Trump was broke despite his grand pronouncements about building the world’s largest casino in Atlantic City.

Friedman seemed intrigued. “How do you know? he asked. I told him “Stevie Wonder Fingertips Part 2. I can just feel it.… It would take a lot of digging to prove and take months. You would have to look up all his mortgages, his junk bond offerings, etc.” After listening for a couple of minutes, Friedman dispatched me with: “Allan, can’t you take ‘Yes’ for an answer? Go do the story.”

Accompanied by John Metaxas, then an ABC producer who had degrees from Columbia Journalism and Columbia Law School, I began a dusty pre-digital age four-month journey through municipal records, court filings, Securities & Exchange Commission documents and dozens of interviews, culminating with a sit-down with Mr. Trump.

On April 2, 1990, the day the Trump Taj Mahal opened in Atlantic City, my first piece went on the air. Peter Jennings led into it by calling the Taj Mahal project “…an example of how Trump does business. Little of the money at stake is his own.”

What I had discovered was pretty simple, although it was so complex and arduous that apparently none of his creditors had ever bothered to undertake the exercise. When I added up all his obligations, I discovered that he owed more than $3 billion against assets worth perhaps 50 percent as much. I also found he owned mere fractions of many properties carrying his name that the public assumed were his. I even looked up every mortgage on apartments in the Trump Tower and discovered that dozens were held in the names of dummy offshore corporations or partnerships that masked the true owners.

When I questioned Trump about the property values he listed on his so-called “net worth statement,” his defense was essentially his assertion that putting the name Trump on a property doubled its value overnight. In that way, he claimed the Plaza Hotel and the Eastern Airlines Shuttle made him look like a genius because they were worth so much more than he paid. As he told me then: “I have really trophy assets and I guess that they are disproportionately valuable because of the fact they are trophies, but I have zero idea what I am worth.”

My favorite sound bite from the initial interview taped on March 30, 1990 was this one. “The institutions that finance what I have, they happen to be in love with Donald Trump. But they are not in love with me because I am a nice guy or anything. They are in love with me because everything I have done has been a tremendous winner.”

My tagline on the initial story about what Trump called “The Eighth Wonder of the World ” – his third casino – went like this: “Trump is gambling with investors money and hoping his customers lose theirs.” The first sound bite had been Trump’s view: “It’s real estate. It’s a hotel. It’s everything, but it is really show biz. And somehow it has just worked out well for me.”

As I later learned, Trump called ABC News President Roone Arledge the next morning to complain about my story and extend an invitation to play golf. Arledge blew off the request and I never heard a word of complaint. I had however received a profane message from Trump the night the story aired on my answering machine, which my wife now regrets I erased since it was such a classic.

The machinations of the Trump story kept getting better and I kept doing it for “World News,” for “Business World With Sander Vanocur” and with Sam Donaldson for “PrimeTime Live.”

On June 5, the leading papers and I reported that Trump was in trouble with his lenders. Jennings began: “… Every acquisition accompanied by a bombardment of self-promotion. And now there is that matter of not enough cash on hand so Mr. Trump is in trouble. Here’s ABC’s Allan Frank.”

I began by detailing how Trump had convinced banks he was a good credit risk and that he now faced interest payments of nearly $1 million a day. The banks had begun to question whether he could make upcoming bond payments on his casinos. Trump’s sound bite from the March 30 interview helped. Trump: “The banks like me because I pay the interest on time and then at the conclusion of the deal, they are gone. They go home happy.”

At the time, my wife Lilian King was the chief of staff for the man at Citibank who ran most of the retail bank and 45,000 employees. The bank’s stock price was low and the CEO John Reed had allowed bad loans to South America to jeopardize the bank’s financial soundness. As guests, we attended a benefit on June 13 at the Waldorf-Astoria at the Citibank table.

Being shy as usual, during the cocktail hour, I kidded the bankers: “I do not understand why you do not have a policy that you will make no loans to Brazil or Donald Trump before 10 am.” One banker asked: “What do you mean about Trump?” and I ticked off his major loans from various divisions of Citibank, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover, and others, including bondholders.

Years later, I learned that I may have sounded an alarm. The highest-ranking Citibank executive at the dinner convened a credit-risk assessment meeting at the bank the following morning to review its position with Trump.

That day, without my wife’s consent or involvement, I felt obligated to call Citibank to ask what the bank’s position would be if Trump were found to be insolvent or go bankrupt.

I got no answer except by the bank’s actions. It turns out this was one of those moments in the history of “Too Big to Fail.” Trump owed so much money to different divisions of Citibank that if it took him down, the bank might have severe problems with government regulators concerned about whether it had enough capital.

So on June 15, I was back on the air, reporting that Trump had unexpectedly made an announcement. He would make a $16 million payment due on Trump Plaza casino, would not make a $30 million one due on the Trump Castle casino and was still trying to negotiate a $60 million bridge loan.

Then on June 26, I was reporting about the banks agreeing to give Trump a $20 million loan to make his next payment. Led by Citibank, his creditors installed an overseer, Steven Bollenbach, the former Chief Financial Officer of the Walt Disney Company, who put Trump on a personal allowance of $450,000 a month. The creditors made Trump dump his private jet, his helicopter and his yacht, which alone cost $250,000 a month to maintain.

Perhaps even more fun than reporting the story myself was producing it for “PrimeTime Live” with Sam Donaldson. We were ignoring Trump’s impending divorce and his infatuation with Marla Maples.

I warned Sam that Trump would promise him a look at the books to support his net worth statement, then find some pretense to withdraw the offer. Trump was true to form.

He offered the books to Sam, then a few minutes later, retracted the offer by labeling Sam as an unsophisticated person who knew nothing about business and would be incapable of understanding the art in Trump’s deals. Donaldson was ready. He accepted Trump’s insults merrily and announced that his lack of knowledge about bookkeeping was the reason ABC News had a Big Eight accounting firm standing by to help him sift through the finances of the Trump empire. For several weeks, Sam would – on the air – offer Trump a new red tie in exchange for fulfilling his promise to hand over the books. Of course, Trump never delivered.

To double-check my recollections about the encounter, I called Sam at his ranch in New Mexico.

“In almost every incident when I brought something up, he would say: “You‘re ignorant “or “clearly out of your league there” or something. In the end, when we turned off the camera, he said something to the effect: “I am sure that you’re not going to use any of that material,” and I said: “Oh No, Mr. Trump. I am going to use every one of the putdowns.”

Donaldson said: “The point is Trump is Trump and when I met him he was no different than he is today. Today, he is using those traits of his to inflame, to divide. At first I thought he was just having a lot of fun and a great time. Then I realized he was serious as his numbers mounted and his support seemed to grow.”

Donaldson says the press and public need not worry. “He is not going to be president. I can assure you of that, not because I have any means of stopping him. But if I know anything about this country, it is not going to make him president. And if I am wrong, then it isn’t the country I thought I knew.”

Madoff Henchman Rats Out Co-Workers

By Allan Dodds Frank

December 3rd 2013

Frank DiPascali, a 33-year employee of the firm that ran the largest Ponzi scheme in recent history, took to the stand to testify Monday (Dec. 2) against his former colleagues.

Frank DiPascali, the Bernie Madoff henchman who won the role as the star witness in the biggest fraud case in American history, torched five of his former colleagues with his testimony Monday in federal court.

Perhaps more important, DiPascali is the first witness to demolish the myth that Bernard Madoff ever had a legitimate investment advisory business. The star witness also pulverized Madoff’s assertion that he had acted alone in constructing the biggest Ponzi scheme in history as he began implicating the five Madoff employees whose defense essentially is that they too were duped by Bernie and did not realize they too were committing fraud. Annette Bongiorno, Madoff’s executive assistant, Daniel Bonventre, his director of operations, and their three co-defendants are the first to stand trial, rather than plead guilty after seeking co-operation agreements from prosecutors.

Before turning himself in, DiPascali, who started as a 19-year-old clerk for Madoff’s firm at 110 Wall Street on Sept. 11, 1975, made millions of dollars as the man in charge of aiding and abetting Madoff in falsifying accounts.

During direct examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Zach asked: “How long had fake trading been going on?”  DiPascali, relaxed and confident in a grey suit, red tie, white button-down collar shirt and black loafers, replied: “For as long as I can remember.” DiPascali explained that when he started, the Madoff firm did do business as a market-maker in small over-the-counter stocks, while “Bernie had the sideline business where he was running (managing) money for a select group of people, usually high net worth individuals.” Even then, DiPascali said, Madoff was concocting a trading strategy that he would describe to his customers in exotic terms. Then the Madoff team would fabricate trades to mirror the alleged strategy on customers’ account statements. As the firm grew bigger and moved to midtown Manhattan, it had to computerize its records to fake so many documents.

Within a day of Madoff’s arrest on Dec 11, 2008, DiPascali was instructing his lawyers to cut a deal with prosecutors since, as he put it in court,” “I was going to jail because of the nature of the operations. I knew the firm was bust at that point.”

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his Ponzi fraud that cost investors nearly $20 billion in real money and another $48 billion in imaginary profits they thought they had earned in their Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities accounts.

For his part fabricating documents while lying to investors, auditors, regulators and investigators for decades, DiPascali, 57, pleaded guilty in August 2009 to 10 felonies and still faces at least 125 years in jail, unless his sentencing judge cuts him a huge break for his extensive co-operation with prosecutors.

In court Monday, DiPascali detailed how he, Madoff’s former secretary and executive assistant Annette Bongiorno, and others fabricated stock trading accounts supposedly containing big name blue chip stocks such as IBM, Disney, AT&T, to convince customers and regulators that all was well and their money was safely invested.

When the October, 1989 stock market crash occurred, Madoff decided to show customers they had escaped much of the collapse because he had “hedged” their investments by using “index options” that reflected the performance of the overall market. Instead, Madoff had ordered DiPascali and others to come up with formulas using index options that would have worked- had they been real. The prosecutor wound up the discussion of Madoff’s handling of the 1989 crash this way: “Was any of the trading happening at all?” “No,” said DiPascali. Prosecutor: “Was it all fake?” DiPascali: “Yes.”

Madoff also hid from everyone how many clients he had, said DiPascali, “because that would truly reveal the fraud.” In anticipation of visits from investigators, Madoff, DiPascali and the people who ran the computerized records department would generate hundreds of pages of fake documents by looking up old stock quotes in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

When a skillful outside auditor from KPMG who was representing HSBC, an international bank that had invested millions with Madoff, came to look at the books, he asked DiPascali to see an entire day’s history of trades. DiPascali said he had responded: “I think we only retain the last day of the month… I realized that did not make any sense and he picked up on that.” So when the auditor asked to see “April 17,” DiPascali coolly picked up the phone and called in house computer expert Jerome O’Hara, now a defendant, and asked for the records. Several hours later, when DiPascali arrived to pick up the newly manufactured documents, he found O’Hara and two other co-defendants JoAnn Crupi and George Perez, “throwing the document around like a medicine ball. They explained to me that the document should look used.” And, DiPascali continued, since it was still warm from the copying machine, they had put it in his office refrigerator to cool it off. Once the document was produced, the auditor checked it off his list, DiPascali said.

In 1992, when the Securities and Exchange Commission stumbled onto an accounting firm called Avellino & Bienes, selling unregistered investment accounts with guaranteed returns that were all based on the money being invested with Madoff, Bernie exploded with rage and fear, said DiPascali. The Florida-based accounting firm had hundreds of investors, many of whom had been recruited by a predecessor firm, Alpern & Avellino, that had been run by Madoff’s father-in-law Sol Alpern.  “Bernie was throwing himself around the office like a lunatic,” testified DiPascali, who then outlined how the staff was mobilized to create reams of fake records for the Avellino & Bienes accounts held by the Madoff firm.

“He wanted to keep the SEC contained inside Avellino & Bienes. He could not afford to have that investigation go any deeper because as you started to peel the onion at Avellino & Bienes, the fraud would be exposed.” DiPascali testified that to hide what was going on from the SEC, he, Bongiorno and others changed the accounting firm’s records to make it appear as though it had less risky investments and was solidly protected by its holdings of U.S. Treasury bills. 

Judge Laura Taylor Swain adjourned the court until Wednesday before the jury got to hear how the conclusion of DiPascali’s explanation of how they fooled the SEC. The defense has promised to attack DiPascali during cross-examination as a liar who will say anything to get a reduced sentence. I wonder whether that will be credible to the jury after DiPascali’s devastatingly detailed and damaging testimony.

Former Wall Street Executive Sallie Krawcheck Critiques Financial Reform Policy

A year after leaving Merrill Lynch, Sallie Krawcheck, one of Wall Street’s leading women, is stepping into the public debate over financial reform.

by Allan Dodds Frank  | October 16, 2012 12:46 PM EDT

Could Sallie Krawcheck—often celebrated as a rare honest voice on Wall Street—help Washington address the nation’s financial ills?

Sallie Krawcheck, a former Merrill Lynch executive, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, Oct. 9, 2012. (Peter Foley / Bloomberg via Getty Images )

Krawcheck, the 47-year-old much-heralded former stock analyst, rose to great heights at Sanford Bernstein, and then as an executive at Citibank and the Merrill Lynch unit of Bank of America. Thirteen months ago, she left Merrill with a severance package reportedly worth $6 million. Lately Krawcheck has been peppering the media with her thoughts and strong recommendations about how to address, if not solve, the gigantic, chronic, almost genetic, ills of the global financial industry.

On the eve of the second presidential debate, I watched as Krawcheck lamented what she presumes will be a lack of discussion by the candidates about how to reduce risk in the financial system, improve bank regulation, or strengthen corporate governance practices.

“It is very difficult, absent another financial downturn, to really institute any additional significant regulatory change,” Krawcheck told the crowd at a Harvard Business School Club of New York event in the offices of international law firm Chadbourne & Parke on Monday. But she challenged the lack of oversight on money-market funds that the public believes are safe. “The fundamental debate is how do we reduce risk in the banks. What is the right amount of risk in the banks?”

In forums ranging from Fortune magazine’s “Most Powerful Women Summit” to the Harvard Business Review, the op-ed pages of The Washington Post and Financial Times, CNBC, Politico, and in more than 700 tweets, Krawcheck has opined about adjusting executive compensation by pinning pay for top executives to the risks they take with shareholders’ money. She says, if they borrow money to leverage the company, let them be paid in junk bonds, not cash, and maybe they will rethink the risks they are taking.

Krawcheck is a creature of Wall Street: smart, charming, extra-ordinarily well spoken, analytical yet funny. And yet, except for not claiming she is part Cherokee, she sounds as though she is as fierce a critic of the financial industry as Elizabeth Warren, the former head of the Consumer Protection Finance Bureau who is now running for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts as a Democrat.

Self-help advice is misguided, she says. “We have a whole industry that has sprung up that is simply to tell women to try harder. Right, how to ask for a raise. How to act, pull up to the table ... I would actually argue the problems are really different from that.”

She generated howls of laughter as she launched into her “do the math” shtick about  the “hair and makeup” handicap.

With a mix of common sense and complex analysis, Krawcheck on Monday offered wide-ranging opinions about handling corporate greed, mismanagement at Citibank and other institutions, and the need for more diversity and women executives at the top of corporate America. “I am not in favor of quotas, but I do believe this is an area where the regulators could step in and have not.” She added: “We have stalled out on the progress of women in business across the board.”

Jokingly, she chided those who fail to recognize the fundamental problem that women get “tired.” She generated howls of laughter as she launched into her “do the math” shtick about  the “hair and makeup” handicap. “As a woman, you spend 15 minutes more a day on personal grooming—hair and makeup—than a guy does. I spend more, but let’s assume 15 minutes a day, an hour and 15 minutes a week, five hours a month, 60 hours a year, one week on hair and make-up, and I have not shaved my legs yet, I have not yet dyed my hair, there is no mani-pedi, the brows have not been waxed, I have not gone to yoga, I have not run, I have done nothing but my friggin’ hair and makeup ... Somebody at some point will address the issue that women get tired.”

Krawcheck, a self-described “bank geek,” believes the issue with new financial regulations, such as the Dodd-Frank Act, is that they are too detailed. “The problem is they are attacking complexity with complexity.”

The Daily Beast asked:  “How is the presidential election going to make a difference in what you would like to see done? Can you parse the two candidates for us?”

Krawcheck hemmed and hawed a little. “I think we are learning more every day. I learned a lot about Joe Biden the other night. I learned that Mitt Romney viewed Dodd-Frank [the comprehensive financial reregulation law still being implemented] as being a kiss to the large banks. That felt new to me. I don’t think the large banks—although I have not been in one for some time—view Dodd-Frank as a kiss to them and view it as a benefit.” After an arcane minute of discussion of the Volcker rule and its ban on proprietary trading by banks, she retreats from the complexities, saying: “Let’s just take the risk down, which means we will just have to wait and see.”

The Daily Beast followed up. “Who would you trust to appoint regulators?” The crowd, cognizant that she suddenly had been waffling, roared as she said: “I am not going to answer that. I am not answering that, not at all. But I do think less detail, big sticks. Less detail, big sticks.”

So why is Krawcheck, such an extraordinarily competent person, suddenly walking a nonpartisan tight rope and trying not to answer the question or offend anyone? What could possibly cause her to do that? Is she being careful because she hopes to be the chief executive officer of another major company. Maybe, but the answer, I would suggest, is that she may be eager to be appointed to a high office in Washington. If she can continue her nonpartisan stance, she might be the ideal person to be in charge of consumer protection, be nominated to the Securities & Exchange Commission or to a Treasury Department job—regardless of who is president.

A look at her history offers few clues. Krawcheck’s political contributions were carefully made to candidates from both parties who had legislative influence over the financial industry. An undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Krawcheck earned an M.B.A. at Columbia University in 1992. She did not respond—before this article was posted—to an emailed question about whether chief Romney economics adviser Glenn Hubbard, a professor then and dean of the Columbia Business School now, has talked to her about a possible cabinet spot in a Republican administration. She also has not talked openly about supporting President Obama either, although in earlier years while at Citibank she contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and to Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who now leads the Democratic minority.

So for those concerned about the safety of the financial industry, continue to follow Sallie Krawcheck to see if and when she will inject her opinions directly into the presidential campaign.

Madoff Trustee Irving Picard Sues JPMorgan for $6.4 Billion; Will Investors Follow?

Is Madoff's Family Next? The two Madoff employees arrested Thursday have been holding out for nearly two years. Allan Dodds Frank on why prosecutors are a step closer to charging Madoff family members.

Bernie Madoff's Velvet Slippers Auctioned While Victims Put on Chopping Block