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It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made--or received--as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a "bad set of facts."

Maintaining public faith in the justice system is one of the reasons why people such as Angelides continue to call for a rigorous criminal investigation into Wall Street. "I think it's fundamental that people in this country need to feel that the justice system is for everyone--that there's not one system for those people of enormous wealth and power, and one for everyone else," he says.

In July 2010, three months after the SEC charged Goldman in the Abacus case, the agency reached a settlement with the firm. Goldman agreed to pay $550 million, but admitted no wrongdoing. The agency touted the amount of the fine as the biggest ever--but to Goldman it was a relative pittance. The fine amounted to about 4 percent of the sum that Goldman paid its executives in bonuses ($12.1 billion) in 2007, the year of the Abacus transaction.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Goldman executives were feeling optimistic that the Justice inquiry would not result in criminal charges against the firm, or its executives. Goldman declined to comment on the case, as did the Justice Department. But spokeswoman Alisa Finelli said, "When we find credible evidence of intentional criminal conduct--by Wall Street executives or others--we will not hesitate to charge it. However, we can and will only bring charges when the facts and the law convince us that we can prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt." Holder, speaking in February at Columbia University, said that while "we found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible ... we have also discovered that some of this behavior--while morally reprehensible--may not necessarily have been criminal."

Midway through his State of the Union speech this year, President Obama announced plans "to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis," and he vowed again to "hold accountable those who broke the law."

That portion of the speech had a familiar ring. In November 2009, Attorney General Holder, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side, announced the creation of another special unit--the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force--that was similarly charged with investigating securities and mortgage fraud that contributed to the financial meltdown. Since its creation, that task force, which critics say was drastically under-resourced, has produced not a single conviction (or even indictment) of a major Wall Street player related to the financial disaster.

Some who heard the president's State of the Union speech thought they discerned a hidden purpose behind his new "special unit"--the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, as it would be called. The day before the president's speech, state attorneys general from around the country met in Chicago with Justice officials to discuss a proposed national settlement with five major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, over questionable foreclosure practices. The administration was pushing the settlement, as were the banks. But a handful of attorneys general were resisting the settlement, believing it gave too much away to the banks--including protection from mortgage-related investigations that were still unfolding. These holdout state officials were supported by a coalition of activists, who argued that the banks would never make meaningful concessions--such as the reduction of principal on underwater mortgages--unless they faced the threat of investigation.

One of those activists, Mike Gecan, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, says he was disheartened when he heard Obama's speech, and the news that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would be co-chairing the new "working group." Schneiderman, who is in the tough-guy mold of his predecessors, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, had been a leader of the state holdouts; now, Gecan feared, Schneiderman had been co-opted by the Chicago Way. "I'm from Chicago, I've seen this game played my whole life," he says.

Gecan's view seemed vindicated two weeks later, when Obama announced that the settlement had been reached.

Nearly three months later, it is not clear what, if any, progress the "working group" has made. The unit was only promised 55 investigators, attorneys, and support staff--a tiny fraction of the resources afforded to similar groups investigating the S&L and Enron/WorldCom scandals--and it is not clear that even that commitment has materialized. "I think what happened is what usually happens: the administration rope-a-doped," says Gecan. "There's no office, there's no director, there's no staff, there's no space, there's no phone."

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