An all-time low in white-collar crime enforcement
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.
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 percent to 30 percent 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 percent 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.