The first big name bankster to get put in the dock is Barack Obama’s biggest backer, Jon Corzine for his role in the collapse of MF Global.

You see it appears that first he successfully lobbied regulators to allow the trades that did his firm in, and then the firm commingled customer funds with their own private risk capital,^* so now he is hiring a lawyer:

Jon S. Corzine has hired Andrew J. Levander, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer, according to three people briefed on the matter, as the former New Jersey governor deals with fallout from the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he has run since last year.

Mr. Corzine resigned from MF Global on Friday morning and will not seek $12 million severance payments.

Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the $630 million in missing customer money at MF Global.

Mr. Levander could not be reached as he is out of the country, according to his assistant. He did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Daniel O’Donnell, the chief executive of Mr. Levander’s law firm, Dechert, declined to comment.

In Mr. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, Mr. Corzine has retained a New York lawyer who is no stranger to defending prominent Wall Street executives. He represented John Thain, the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, in a government inquiry related his role in Merrill’s sale to Bank of America. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard L. Madoff, hired Mr. Levander to defend him against a New York attorney general’s lawsuit connected to the Madoff case.

The only question now is who is first, Barack Obama, claiming never to have known the guy, or the Republicans, who will try to super glue Corzine to him.

Pass the popcorn.

^*The technical term for this is “stealing”.