Trump News

A shift in Department of Justice priorities since Donald Trump's return to office has led to reduced enforcement of white-collar financial crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal reported on New Year's Eve that significant changes at the DOJ have fundamentally altered white-collar crime enforcement operations.

Most notably, the Trump administration's focus on attracting foreign investment to support the struggling economy has prompted both the DOJ and SEC to scale back enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Only six FCPA cases have been filed this year compared to an annual average of 33 since 2015, with the Journal describing enforcement actions as having "fallen off a cliff."

The Journal reports, "The Justice Department, focused on White House priorities such as immigration enforcement and violent crime, has stepped back from the kinds of complicated investigations into foreign bribery, money laundering and public corruption that former department leaders often cited among their greatest successes."

President Trump himself has requested a six-month enforcement freeze, believing restrictions cripple U.S. companies operating internationally.

In response, Justice Department officials have closed nearly half of open foreign-bribery investigations and directed that future cases be connected to U.S. strategic interests, including transnational drug cartel operations.

Current and former Justice Department officials attribute the decline in white-collar enforcement partly to prosecutors and investigators being reassigned to other law enforcement priorities within the government.

You can read more here.

Following the Supreme Court's grant of near-total immunity to Donald Trump, the president has issued executive orders at a record pace, with the conservative-leaning court approving most of them through the so-called "shadow docket."

According to the New Republic's Erin M. Carr, Trump's radical restructuring of government operations relies heavily on rhetoric while remaining legally questionable. The court has granted the president extraordinary latitude in his actions.

Carr repurposed the concept of "sanewashing" –– a term describing how mainstream media transforms Trump's incoherent statements into palatable content for public consumption. She argues the Supreme Court engages in a similar practice by legitimizing the president's legally tenuous executive orders.

Carr contends this judicial approach is not unprecedented. The Roberts Court has consistently engaged in what she characterizes as sanewashing across two decades of rulings. "Relying on judicial sanewashing, the Roberts Court has eroded due process protections, political accountability, and civil rights, while simultaneously consolidating power for itself, corporations, gun owners, Christian conservatives, and state officials who owe their political influence to heavily gerrymandered districts."

In recent months, the Roberts Court has adopted a new sanewashing strategy through the shadow docket. "On the shadow docket, the Roberts Court has inserted itself into high-stakes legal challenges against the Trump administration, sanewashing and mischaracterizing lower court rulings preventing the administration's lawless conduct as 'emergencies' to justify intervening on the president's behalf," Carr wrote. "Notably, the shadow docket has been expanded by the Roberts Court for the near-exclusive benefit of the Trump administration, and only the Trump administration."

Carr warns of the consequences: "The Roberts Court has legitimized anti-democratic legal theories and advanced a biased, ahistorical interpretation of the Constitution through the sanewashing of law and fact. The extent and magnitude of the effects of judicial sanewashing are now on full display, threatening to corrupt our democratic system and shared sense of reality."

You can read more here.