Senior Justice official to depart after Credit Suisse plea

A senior Justice Department official will soon head for the exits, shortly after playing a key role in securing a guilty plea from the Swiss banking power Credit Suisse.

{mosads}Kathryn Keneally, the assistant attorney general for the tax division, will leave the Justice Department on June 5 and return to her home in New York, the department announced Tuesday.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that Keneally and her colleagues had made great strides in battling offshore tax evasion in her two years on the job.

“The tax division has secured historic gains in our fight to protect the American people from tax fraud and financial misconduct and to hold accountable any individual, bank or other institution that violates our tax laws,” Holder said in a statement.

The department’s announcement comes just over a week after the department announced the record $2.6 billion in fines that come with Credit Suisse’s admission that it helped U.S. taxpayers hide assets and income from the IRS.

Keneally herself said the tax division “benefited from the strong relationship between the division and the Internal Revenue Service, which shares our commitment to tax enforcement and voluntary tax compliance.”

In addition to the Credit Suisse plea, Keneally has also played a key role in a program that allows Swiss banks to make good on past indiscretions. Wegelin, the oldest Swiss bank, also pleaded guilty under her watch.

Still, some lawmakers and liberal activists said that the Credit Suisse case falls short of proving that “too big to jail” doesn’t exist, as Holder said last week.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) also said he was disappointed that Credit Suisse wouldn’t be forced to hand over the names of account holders to federal authorities.