Episode 34

A Conversation With Jesse Eisinger, Author of 'The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives'

In a single decade, the prosecutions of those accused of white-collar crime underwent a radical transformation. This thought-provoking episode will take you back in time to explore the DOJ approach in the early 2000s Enron era and walk you forward into the Great Recession and the collapse of the financial markets.

Jesse Eisinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, joins host Matt Adams to discuss his book, "The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives."

The pair discusses how the pendulum swung drastically from a time of nightly executive perp walks on the evening news, to today, where settlements reign supreme and accountability for inflicting widespread economic harm via white-collar crimes is absent.

You’ll discover the historical context for the Department of Justice's current Principles of Corporate Prosecution and find out how politics — sometimes counterintuitively — plays into the Department of Justice’s actions.