Donald Trump calls himself the “law and order” president,
but when it comes to white collar crime, he has overseen a significant decline
in enforcement, reported Bloomberg.
The prosecution of securities fraud, antitrust violations
and other such crimes has hit a record low as the pandemic slows the
courts, according to one tracking service. But even before the coronavirus, the
numbers were falling under the Trump administration.
The average annual number of white collar
defendants was down 26% to 30% for Trump’s first three years in office
from the average under President Barack Obama, according to data from the
Justice Department and Syracuse University, respectively. The trend also shows
up in fines on corporations, which fell 76%
from Obama’s last 20 months to Trump’s first 20 months, according to Duke
University law professor Brandon Garrett.
“Mr. Trump sets the tone,” said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School whose new
book, “Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement,”
analyzes the decline.
Trump’s Justice Department has even presided over a plunge
in deferred-prosecution agreements, Coffee said. In a DPA, a
company is charged with a crime but prosecutors agree to drop the case
later if it admits wrongdoing, pays a penalty and makes required reforms.
The administration has also brought fewer white collar racketeering and
money-laundering cases, crimes that carry harsher penalties, he said.
“All that is an indication that white collar crime is not a
priority,” Coffee said. “If you want to celebrate corporations as leading
our economy and the stock market up higher and higher, you don’t want to indict
them.”
The Justice Department says it hasn’t eased up at all.
Prosecutors “continue to bring federal charges in white
collar and other cases according to facts, the law and the principles of
federal prosecution,” said Peter Carr, who was a spokesman for the department’s
Criminal Division until moving recently to the Department of
Homeland Security.
The Department of Justice “can’t vouch for TRAC’s
methodology,” Carr said, referring to Syracuse University’s Transactional
Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors trends in federal
law enforcement and whose records reflect a decline of about 30% in
prosecutions under Trump. He added that TRAC data “routinely differs”
from the reports of the U.S. attorney offices, the U.S. Sentencing Commission
and the U.S. Courts, among others.
TRAC’s tallies are based on “hundreds of millions of
records” from each U.S. attorney’s office, said the group, which has been
following the data for more than two decades. Cases are counted based
on when they’re recorded in a prosecutor’s database, following the DOJ’s own
practice, it said.
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