Matt Taibbi has a good article on the destruction of records from preliminary investigations known as “Matters Under Inquiry,” (MUI) apparently in violation of the SEC’s agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration and other federal records retention laws.
More importantly, it’s bad police practice to destroy such letters. According to Taibbi’s report, the practice, since 1993, has been to destroy MUI documents if the MUI doesn’t get green-lighted to become a “formal investigation.” To make that jump, it has to get the approval from higher ups from the enforcement division. These higher ups routinely get big pay days on Wall Street after they leave the SEC.
Taibbi points out that it’s pretty atypical for a law enforcement agency to destroy its own evidence. He concludes:
We’ll never know what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we’ll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We’ll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street’s dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.
And that’s what motivates wikileaks?