Whistleblowers from a Swiss Bank have come forward, claiming that the bank was helping wealthy Americans hide money from the IRS for years, even after they had been prosecuted for doing so. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Whistleblowers from a Swiss bank have come forward claiming that the bank was helping wealthy Americans hide billions of dollars from the IRS even after they had been prosecuted. Farron, they were, the bank was prosecuted just not a few years ago for doing the same thing. They’re criminals. They don’t look like criminals because they got this nice suit on. You know, they’re dressed up in a suit. They got a white shirt, they got a tie on so they don’t look like criminals. They’re absolutely criminals. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So what these whistleblowers have come forward telling us, and this is Credit Suisse, which is now not even a bank. UBS basically bought them out after they had failed repeatedly and got bailed out by, you know, the Swiss government. But these whistleblowers said, listen, under United States government sanctions, we were put under these strict orders. You couldn’t do this. You couldn’t have these accounts. You couldn’t hide money. And we’re here to tell you, because they came to the federal government and said this, we’ve been doing it. We have all of these documents. We have evidence that we’ve been destroying documents. We’ve been hiding all of this. They’ve been telling us to hide it. They’ve been putting quotas on us for how many people’s accounts we had to sign up. It is just a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Do you remember, you know, Eric Holder, again, Eric Holder, 2014 says, look, you guys have been, you have sham entities where you’re saying that this American citizen actually is a corporation and he’s a British corporation, and therefore that’s one way to hide money. They have destroyed, they destroyed account records for that made up entity. They actually hand delivered cash in America. They would show up in Miami and with boxes of cash for this person that they’re trying to, you know, trying to squirrel away from paying taxes. They changed nationalities for people. That’s what this bank did. Now that’s what Eric Holder found them doing in 2014. You know what, nobody went to prison, just like Eric Holder on HSBC, where we found the banks were washing money for terrorists that were killing American soldiers and American contractors, 16 pages where they admit doing that, Eric Holder throws nobody in prison. And that’s why this is happening again.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if these executives had been walked away in handcuffs, if they were in orange jumpsuits picking up trash on the side of the road, the next CEO’s not gonna do this same crap. But because they know, okay, we can make X amount of money before we get caught. When we get caught, we will have to pay out this amount. So we’ll make a profit of, you know, whatever X over Y. That’s our profit.
Mike Papantonio: Why doesn’t the Department of Justice prosecute these people? We talked about it last week, where even Ronald Reagan prosecuted 800 bankers, threw 800 bankers in prison. That hasn’t been done with Bill Clinton, wasn’t done with Bush, wasn’t done with Obama, wasn’t done with Trump. Certainly wasn’t done when they had ’em dead to rights. They had ’em signing documents, we did all these bad things, and nobody’s prosecuted. What’s up?
Farron Cousins: Well, that’s where all of these Justice Department lawyers want to go work when they leave office or that’s where they came from before they went to the DOJ. These are their friends. These are the people they grew up with. We went to law school together. We’re not gonna, we’re not gonna get you. Don’t worry.
Mike Papantonio: Eric Holder, great example. Right? Covington Burling, their specialty is defending white collar criminals. He comes from Covington, Obama takes him outta that firm, puts him in to the AG in America. He’s the guy that makes all these decisions. He lets all of these criminals go. And then the story really ends well for him. They, Covington Burling hires him back. They triple his salary. They give him this luxurious office on the fifth floor where basically he has the entire floor. That’s the payoff for not prosecuting. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yep. And that’s where he came from. That’s where he returned to as soon as he retired. And that’s what we see because we’re not picking attorneys general who come from, you know, your firm. I mean, hell, this country would be a much different place if we did, we’d see a lot more people in jail. But we’re getting the corporate defense lawyers who made their fortunes defending these people and they continue it once they get power.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
