When it comes to the Trump administration’s approach to law enforcement, much of the president’s second term has featured one personnel purge after another at the Justice Department and the FBI. But Republican officials aren’t just ousting people in federal law enforcement, they’re also closing offices that have done important work over the years.
Take the FBI’s public corruption squad, for example. The New York Times reported:
The F.B.I. is disbanding a squad that handles investigations into members of Congress and fraud by federal employees, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that comes as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate or marginalize units responsible for public corruption cases. … The special agent in charge of criminal matters at the field office — who was recently responsible for investigating the Biden administration’s green energy grants — was also pushed out of his job, those people said.
The Times’ report, which has been independently verified by NBC News, added that the moves are some of FBI Director Kash Patel’s “most drastic to date,” adding that the demise of the public corruption squad, known internally as CR15, could “reduce the bureau’s capacity to fulfill one of its core missions: leading major investigations into public corruption cases.”
As for the motivation behind the developments, NBC News’ Ryan Reilly, who first broke the story, noted that this is the same FBI unit “that aided Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation into President Donald Trump.”
It’s dramatic enough that the FBI is shutting down a squad with, as the Times put it, “vast experience handling complicated investigations involving public officials,” but making matters even worse is the larger pattern.
Consider the related moves since Donald Trump returned to the White House:
- Trump’s Justice Department gutted its Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption.
- The president ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
- Trump fired at least 18 inspectors general who were responsible for rooting out corruption.
- Trump fired the head of the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers.
- Trump’s budget director is gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has spent years taking on corruption that affects consumers.
- Trump’s Justice Department abandoned a corruption case against Eric Adams.
- A Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., demoted multiple senior supervisors involved in, among other things, public corruption cases.
- Trump’s Justice Department abandoned a criminal case against a former Republican congressman who’d already been found guilty of corruption by a jury. That came on the heels of Trump’s Justice Department also taking steps to abandon a criminal investigation into a different Republican congressman accused of corruption.
- Trump pardoned former Gov. Rob Blagojevich, whose crimes are synonymous with corrupt Illinois politics but who has also aligned himself with the president.
The Trump administration has never explicitly said that it’s tolerant of corruption, but given the circumstances, does it really have to?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
