This last week I had the honor of being interviewed for The Whistleblower Newsroom, a podcast by whistleblowers, for whistleblowers, developed and hosted by journalists Celia Farber, TruthBarrier.com, and Kristina Borjesson.
Although I had visited with Ms. Borjesson several times on the phone over the last three years, we first met last November at the Government Accountability Project 40th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C. She was the master of ceremonies at the celebration when the renowned portrait painter, Robert Shetterly of Americans Who Tell the Truth, unveiled my portrait and several others.
Ms. Borjesson has edited an award-winning collection of essays, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (2002), for which she wrote a chapter detailing her investigation of the TWA Flight 800 crash. Into the Buzzsaw won the Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and an Independent Publishers Award in the current events category.
She also won an Emmy for investigative reporting and a Murrow award for her work as Field Producer/Reporter for the CBS Reports documentary, “Legacy of Shame,” updating CBS’s signature documentary on migrant farmworkers. In 2013, she wrote, produced and directed TWA Flight 800, a feature-length investigative film in which former members of the original government investigation into the mid-air explosion of a 747 off the coast of Long Island, New York, on July 17, 1996, come forward to discuss how the original investigation was undermined.
Being familiar with her work and the podcast, I tuned into The Whistleblower Newsroom, and listened to their podcast about 911 and the collapse of the twin towers, which featured lawyers David Meiswinkle and Bill Jacoby discussing an upcoming grand jury hearing where they’ll present forensic evidence showing explosives were used on 9/11 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings.
I was aghast and intrigued as to what I saw described as government interference into justice and the parallels to what they endured and my attempts to hold Citigroup accountable for the malfeasance I had witnessed and eventually blew the whistle on, by two government agencies, the SEC and DOJ, and the FCIC (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission).
And so I emailed Ms. Borjesson and was invited to join her on a podcast that aired this week, talking about what I had experienced and the parallels of more government cover-ups.
Ms. Borjesson mentioned the national debt averaging $75,000 per taxpayer resulting from the 2008 financial debacle and the bailout of the Too Big to Fail. She asked about the SEC’s continuing refusal to release, under multiple FOIA requests, any of the 1,000 pages of Citigroup documents that I had given the SEC three months before the bank bailouts, with the SEC claiming that the documents were “confidential” and “trade secrets.” Ms. Borjesson asked, “isn’t there a law that if your documents contain some evidence of a crime, they can’t be secret?”
Yes, and I mentioned that I had printed many of the documents, including the fraudulent representations given to the purchasers of mortgage-backed securities, off the internet and the SEC’s own website of publicly traded securities registrations. Ms. Borjesson then noted that now the SEC is saying that the documents are considered trade secrets and too volatile for Americans to learn more about.
I told my story – now a familiar one to my readers, of the continual attempts while at Citigroup to stop what I perceived as fraud and which eventually led to my being stripped of all my responsibilities and being asked to leave.
I mentioned that I had been requested by the FCIC to submit up to 30 pages of written testimony containing much of the damaging evidence, but when they received my 28 pages of testimony, they said it was too long and they would tell what to take out.
And they did; take out – the 1,000 pages of documents I’d sent to the SEC, take out – my concerns of Sarbanes Oxley violations of the law, out – the fraudulent misrepresentations which were given to the purchasers of mortgage-backed securities. Ms. Borjesson protested, “that’s a crime right there.”
They asked I take out all the names involved at Citigroup and the specific incidences of cover-ups they’d originally asked me to include. She protested, “So they don’t want you to name names either? So, you can’t talk about the crimes!” Right I said, if I had not conceded to their demands I could not have testified, that much was clear, and I would never have been able to talk about what had occurred.
Since it was announced in the headlines the day I sent my original testimony that the U.S. Treasury was planning to sell on the open market it’s 7.7 billion shares of stock in Citigroup, and if word of any malfeasance became public the stock would have crashed … was there a cover-up?
Is it that they did not want the public to know, that the government knew about the malfeasance going on in banks and that they still bailed them out?
Ms. Borjesson mused, “that’s a conspiracy, so information about the crimes would not be good for the evaluation of the stock…? If one arm of the government is making money off another, and that other is engaging in criminal activity; there is a conflict of interest right there!”
No, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Still, call it what you will, there appear to be too many coincidences in too many places of our government not allowing the truth to be published.
Richard Bowen is widely known as the Citigroup whistleblower. As Business Chief Underwriter for Citigroup during the housing bubble financial crisis meltdown, he repeatedly warned Citi executive management and the board about fraudulent behavior within the organization. The company certified poor mortgages as quality mortgages and sold them to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other investors.
