Or, rather -- since it seems that the government plans no investigation -- they want key documents from AIG so they can do it themselves.
The three of us, as experienced investigators and prosecutors of financial fraud, cannot answer these questions now. But we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated by A.I.G. during the past decade. Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation.
...
Perhaps A.I.G.’s employees would also be judged not guilty. But we would like to see the record to find out. As fraud investigators, we would like to examine the trading patterns of A.I.G.’s financial products division, and its communications with Goldman Sachs and other bank counterparties who benefited from the bailout. We would like to understand whether the leaders of A.I.G. understood that they were approaching a financial Armageddon, and whether they alerted their counterparties, regulators and shareholders to the impending calamity.
We would like to see how A.I.G. was able to pay huge bonuses to its officers based on the short-term income they received from counterparties for selling guarantees that, lacking adequate loss reserves, the companies would never be able to honor. We would also like to know what regulators knew, and what they did with the information they had obtained.
Well!
The New York Times opinion piece notes that simply making these e-mails public will likely result in an "open source" investigation of sorts.
Any high school whiz kid can rig together a couple dozen high-powered server instances in the computing cloud and start the text crunching.
(In fact, if the e-mails do become public, I would suggest that the Progressive blogosphere take the lead in doing the above.)
I am one of those who is mystified by a government that refuses to regulate, refuses to investigate and refuses to prosecute in the wake of the recent crisis.
I think that making these e-mails public could give government a kick in the pants when it comes to finding out who is responsible for this mess. It might lead to something we haven't seen an ounce of in the last year:
Accountability.