Trump’s AG Is Disbanding Anti-Corruption Teams for Some Reason
On Wednesday evening, one day into her tenure as U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi announced the end of the Kleptocracy Initiative, launched by the Justice Department in 2010 to battle high-level corruption worldwide and return ill-gotten funds to victims of financial crimes. The former Florida attorney general and legal counsel to President Trump during his first impeachment trial, who spent the last several years as a corporate lobbyist, also closed the KleptoCapture task force, created under AG Merrick Garland in 2022 to target Russian oligarchs violating U.S. economic sanctions imposed because of Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. Through the initiative, the DOJ has prosecuted frauds worth billions, recovering embezzled funds and seizing assets like megayachts and luxury condos.
Bondi’s memo frames the elimination of these programs as a way to “revise existing
national security and counter-narcotics strategies to pursue total elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs),” in accordance with Trump’s designation of these groups as foreign terrorist organizations. (Trump has even floated the idea of deploying U.S. Armed Forces against Mexican drug cartels.) Meanwhile, attorneys assigned to kleptocracy work, according to Bondi’s memo, “shall return to their prior posts, and resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels and TCOs.” The dissolution of the anti-corruption initiative comes under the heading “Removing Bureaucratic Impediments to Aggressive Prosecutions.”
Bondi’s DOJ is now presumably free to spend a multi-billion dollar forfeiture fund of money seized through these efforts — otherwise repatriated to the nations it was stolen from — however it likes. That could mean anything from expanded contracts with private prisons (Trump has already reversed a Biden administration order that prevented the Justice Department from renewing such contracts) to new mass detention camps for immigrants in Guantánamo Bay and along the border.
Like others in Trump’s cabinet and Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Bondi has moved quickly to kill Biden-era directives and policies that the MAGA movement demonizes as “woke.” She rescinded a Garland memo, for instance, on actions to advance environmental justice, citing Trump’s complaint that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” She also announced that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division “will investigate, eliminate, and penalize” what she characterized as “illegal” efforts to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the department.
Another Bondi memo is decidedly retributive in nature, creating a new task force to probe Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump, federal cooperation leading to the criminal conviction of the president in a Manhattan court for the falsification of business records, and prosecutions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Ed Martin, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, previously fired around 30 prosecutors who worked on those cases, and the White House appears to be gearing up to purge FBI agents who investigated Capitol rioters or Trump himself.
In the same memo that ended the Kleptocracy Initiative, Bondi said the Justice Department would roll back its enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Foreign Agents Registration Act, laws concerning international white-collar crime. FCPA prosecutions, she revealed, would now focus on cartels and TCOs, in line with the reassignment of anti-kleptocracy prosecutors and resources. That law was established, however, to prevent U.S. citizens and businesses from bribing foreign government officials; restricting its application just to bribery involving cartels and similar groups greatly diminishes its scope. FARA requires Americans to disclose to the DOJ when they are lobbying within the U.S. on behalf of foreign countries or interests, as well as their compensation. Notably, Bondi did exactly this as a lobbyist, representing a U.K. sports betting company, a Kuwati investment firm, and the embassy of Qatar. Now, according to Bondi, prosecutions by the FARA unit “shall be limited to instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” This, too, radically shrinks the use of an important law.
But such decisions are to be expected from Bondi as she twists the DOJ into an agency that reflects her staunch and long-standing loyalty to Trump, whose first term was dogged by sordid allegations about his ties to Russia and susceptibility to foreign influence. We’ve since learned that he raked in millions from foreign governments while in office, and a department that looked too closely into such transactions this time around would certainly not be to his liking. Instead, it is free to go after his political enemies and bang the drum for what could well be disastrous military intervention in Mexico. That’s “justice” for you in 2025 — and beyond.
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