Elizabeth Warren: Obama is 'shockingly weak' on corporate crime

Elizabeth Warren offers some harsh criticism for Obama. — (Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In a newly released report, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) offers harsh criticism of President Obama's handling of corporate malfeasance. Warren's 12-page booklet argues that lax enforcement by the Obama administration results in "rigged justice," a point she illustrates by examining 20 cases from 2015 in which she says "the federal government failed to require meaningful accountability."

Warren charges that Obama's record on "accountability for corporate crimes is shockingly weak":

Obama administration officials routinely discuss the need for tough enforcement. [...] Despite this rhetoric, DOJ civil and criminal settlements — and enforcement actions by other federal agencies — continually fail to impose any serious threat of punishment on corporate offenders. This is true regardless of the scope of their crimes or their impact on the economy, on workers, on investors, or on the environment. The pattern of weak enforcement extends beyond the Justice Department to other enforcement agencies. [Rigged Justice]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.