Don’t Hold Your Breath
December 8, 2008
A Washington Examiner editorial challenges the incoming Obama Administration to launch a Justice Department investigation of the corrupt practices of felon Bill Lerach and the securities class action bar. Mr. Lerach and several of his former partners at the notorious Milberg Weiss law firm (including Melvyn Weiss himself) were convicted of paying more than $11 million in illegal kickbacks to front-men clients in more than 250 cases.
As the Examiner points out, Mr. Lerach defended this illegal scheme as standard “industry practice” and revealed that “everybody” in the trial bar engaged in similar conduct. Yet congressional leaders, who routinely drag corporate CEOs before the TV cameras to express outrage at the actions of business executives, have ignored calls by Republicans to investigate the scandalous behavior of the trial bar.
Will the Obama Administration take the lead in uncovering trial bar corruption? Don’t hold your breath. As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, since 1990, law firms and attorneys have pumped nearly $1 billion – that’s billion, with a “b” – into federal campaigns, about three-quarters of it to Democrats. In the 2008 election cycle alone, Democrats raked in nearly $165 million from their trial lawyer allies – more than seven times the amount Republican candidates collected from the much-maligned Oil & Gas industry. President-elect Obama collected nearly $37 million from lawyers and law firms alone.
Apparently that kind of money doesn’t just buy influence in Washington – it buys immunity.