Ever since the Great Recession, there’s been a palpable feeling in the populist Left and some quarters of the populist Right that Wall Street executives “got away with it,” that key bankers and traders should be cooling their heels in prison and not enjoying the fruits of their golden parachutes. Americans suffered — so the argument goes — and the architects of our doom got a free ride. No more, says the Department of Justice. They’re going after corporate scoundrels with both barrels:

Stung by years of criticism that it has coddled Wall Street criminals, the Justice Department issued new policies on Wednesday that prioritize the prosecution of individual employees — not just their companies — and put pressure on corporations to turn over evidence against their executives.
The new rules, issued in a memo to federal prosecutors nationwide, are the first major policy announcement by Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch since she took office in April. The memo is a tacit acknowledgment of criticism that despite securing record fines from major corporations, the Justice Department under President Obama has punished few executives involved in the housing crisis, the financial meltdown and corporate scandals.

Good luck with that. I’ve been involved in multiple white-collar crime investigations, and the kinds of cases the activists most long for also happen to be among the most difficult to prosecute. Demanding convictions is not the same thing as securing convictions, and securing convictions is not the same thing as upholding them on appeal. In the last decade-plus we’ve seen numerous white-collar legal Hindenburgs — majestic pieces of criminal litigation that burst into flames in federal court. In 2009, for example, Business Insider chronicled the “Complete Humiliation of the Enron Task Force,” using slide after slide to show the comprehensive failure of the DOJ’s aggressive effort to punish all the key players in Enron’s collapse — a failure that included large-scale prosecutorial misconduct. As Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal noted, “Prosecutors won a few trophies, but mainly they just wasted a lot of money and ruined a lot of people’s lives.”

Business failures are not always (or even usually) criminal, and I fear that the Attorney General’s new memo will only magnify the “three felonies a day” mentality of aggressive federal prosecutors — where they zealously pursue scalps rather than earnestly seek justice.