SEC wasn't quite sleeping under Christopher Cox's leadership. They were watching porn!

I had written here that Christopher Cox, former head of the SEC under the Bush Administration, should have been brought up on charges of incompetence and criminal behavior for all the problems related to the SEC during the years 2007 and 2008. The headlines today reveal just how bad things were under Cox's leadership. Here's the headline: "GOP ramps up attacks on SEC over porn surfing."

and now a few excerpts:

"WASHINGTON – Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation's financial system."

" it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse.

In addition here's some other juicy tidbits:

• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.

A Congressman from California said he expects the head of the SEC, Mary Schapiro and her team, are "very focused on" the issue. Schapiro has been parrying GOP complaints about the Goldman Sachs lawsuit, which agency officials hoped would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.

Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans. Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of both parties.

So you see, there is much to charge Christopher Cox with given this probe. He surely deserves it and I am pressing Congress to hold hearings and subpoena Mr. Cox to testify. And boy do I hope they file charges of some kind so he has to spend some jail time!

If you are interested in reading my earlier Blogs on Christopher Cox, click here and here, or here and if you are interested in reading the entire news story above from Yahoo, click here.