See if you can make sense of this. Somehow, in the space of seven months, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has gone from being:

By Jonathan Weil

1) the defeatist law-enforcement chief who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that some banks are too big to prosecute because of the economic damage that might ensue, to

2) the crackdown artist who presided over a meeting in which his team told JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon that the bank would need to enter a guilty plea in order to end a criminal investigation by prosecutors in California.

What gives? Maybe Holder will let JPMorgan skate once the probe is completed. Yet clearly a new approach is afoot. After that meeting, the Justice Department proposed that JPMorgan plead guilty to making false statements related to sales of defective mortgage bonds. The bank proposed a nonprosecution agreement, which Holder rejected, according to an Oct. 22 article by Bloomberg News.

Not long ago, large banks could be fairly confident they wouldn’t face criminal charges in the U.S. no matter what they got caught doing. Now the Justice Department is keeping the threat of such charges hanging over JPMorgan while the bank wraps up $13 billion in civil settlements with various government agencies.

New Aggressiveness

Holder said in an interview that the department’s new aggressiveness on bank investigations was a top priority for both President Barack Obama and himself. (Holder didn’t talk about JPMorgan specifically.) Obama promised in his 2012 State of the Union address to hold banks accountable for their role in helping cause the worst recession since the Great Depression. A task force was set up, and it played a significant role in the pending JPMorgan deal.

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