> cronies of the justice department

Note to future readers: This is an inaccurate characterization. Also, the article linked to is some political FUD; every other paragraph contains a quip about a lawless Obama or corrupt Democrats (which is off-putting but would be fine if the author had managed to cite a single primary source.)

Here are some facts I was able to dig up (with my editorials/thoughts/WAGs marked as such by [[ ]], since the WSJ article irritated the hell out of me by not bothering to delineate fact from pure unsubstantiated bulshit...):

* In a few high-profile financial fraud cases, DoJ incentivized large financial organizations to donate to nonprofits by crediting those donations against the total awarded amount at greater than their real value.

[[ Presumably DoJ did this because DoJ felt even at the discounted rate, sending money directly to non-profits with existing strategies and networks would be more beneficial to the most effected victims than the alternative. Which is probably true, since the alternatives would likely be some negligible payout to large numbers of people or else just putting that money back into the federal budget. ]]

* Allowing discounted donations to charities that assist effected groups is not unprecedented in federal lawsuits, and this practice pre-dates the Obama administration.

* It's somewhat difficult to actually find the the "list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries" alluded to in the article, which yummyfajitas/the author selected from ("La Raza", "Urban League").

My best guess is that they are both referring to the NeighborWorks Network, because that's the only charity explicitly mentioned in either of the settlements [3,4]. If I'm wrong, yummyfajitas should point us to this white list so that we can determine if the list is systematically biased or if it just happens to contain charities with left (as well as right) leaning biases. Especially because I was unable to find such as list in any of the mentioned settlements.

* NeighborWorks is a network of 240+ charities [1]. Government agencies supporting the network is not unprecedented [2]. The network has a varied history and no single delineated origin, but it's not entirely inaccurate to say that Congress created the NeighborWorks network during the Carter administration [2].

* Using the NeighborWorks Network as a proxy for federal assistance pre-dates the Obama administration.

[[ It's difficult to say whether there's a political bias in the NeighborWorks list; I think this point is probably debatable. ]]

[[ Most of those charities do appear to be focused on housing issues. Which are exactly the type of charity it makes sense to subsidize with cash from a settlement regarding financial fraud that disproportionately effected former home owners. ]]

[[ More generally, I'm not convinced that sending money to charities with a targeted political bias is a bad thing. For example, consider a large billion-dollar DoJ suit against the patent troll or a troll sending out false take-down requests. I think it'd be great and also fair to send some of that money to the EFF instead of into the fed gov't's coffers, even though the EFF clearly absolutely 100% has targeted political biases... ]]

[[ Given the list of charities, it's extremely unlikely that any of the settlement money was used to "campaign against voter ID laws" as yummfajita's only source charges, and as a matter of law none of the settlement was (legally) used to support a specific candidate due to the nature of the charters of the organizations in the network. ]]

[1] http://www.neighborworks.org/Our-Network

[2] http://www.neighborworks.org/about-us/what-we-do/history

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion... -- links to settlement at bottom of page.

[4] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-federal-an... -- linksto settlement at bottom of page.