Corruption cases have dropped under the Trump Justice Department, continuing a downward trend dating back to the Clinton administration, according to a government watchdog.
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| Attorney General Jeff Sessions attends a news conference to announce enforcement efforts against Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018, at the Justice Department in Washington. |
Fewer than 400 cases were projected to be brought in fiscal 2018, the first time in 20 years of data that the number has fallen so low, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
The Justice Department disputes the TRAC data, though some of its own measures also show a general decline, as experts say the government has siphoned resources to other priorities and prosecutors forgo corruption charges in favor of easier-to-prove cases of perjury, mail fraud or obstruction of justice.
“So many of the corruption cases are not charged under a corruption-type offense,” said former prosecutor Ellen Podgor, a law professor at Stetson University. “It is much easier to proceed on a shortcut offense because they get the conviction and require less resources than corruption.”
The Justice Department prosecuted 340 corruption cases during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2018, according to TRAC’s data. At that pace, there will be 371 total prosecutions for the fiscal year, a 23.5 percent drop from fiscal 2017, when 485 cases were prosecuted.
Compared to previous years, the decline is even more precipitous. The estimate of 371 prosecutions is a nearly 42 percent drop from the 636 prosecutions in fiscal 2013; a 45 percent decline from 675 prosecutions in fiscal 2008 and whopping 59.1 percent fall from 906 prosecutions in 1998.
The Trump administration has prioritized drug, violent crime and immigration cases, leaving less time and resources for other crimes, including public corruption. According to Justice Department’s own numbers, prosecutions for offenses like federal firearm offenses and illegal reentry into the United States have increased by double digits in fiscal year 2018.
“Ultimately, this is a story about math,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, who teaches classes on public corruption at Chapman University. “If you increase resources in one place, you have to decrease them somewhere else. Public corruption is a likely target because these cases are resource intensive.”
The Justice Department says TRAC’s numbers are flawed because they are based on Freedom of Information Act requests of court filings, rather than the numbers tallied by the department itself from its own litigation and sentencing databases.
“We are unable to verify data provided by TRAC,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Times. “TRAC selectively cites statistics, which could lead a reader to inaccurate conclusions from the information provided by TRAC.”
TRAC Director Susan Long said its data comes from the same sources as the Justice Department because both institutions are counting filings made by U.S. attorneys across the country.
“We are using the Justice Department’s definition and the same definition is being used every year,” Ms. Long said. “Under those definitions, public corruption cases have gone down.”
Two sources the Justice Department uses to compile its corruption prosecution data also show a decline over time.
U.S. attorneys reported handling 581 corruption cases in 2010, but that dropped steadily to 416 cases in fiscal 2016, the final year of the Obama administration.
The Public Integrity Division, which tracks the number of officials prosecuted, tells the same story. In 2010, 1,184 state and local officials were slapped with corruption charges, plummeting to 982 in 2016.
Final 2018 numbers won’t be available for another two months, the Justice Department spokesperson said.
The Justice Department still has an appetite for high-profile corruption cases. In the past decade eight members of Congress have faced corruption charges. The number exceeds two dozen, going back to the FBI’s Abscam investigation of 1980, which netted seven congressional lawmakers.
Two GOP congressmen have faced charges this year: Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California. Both were among early supporters of President Trump in the 2016 campaign, and he pointedly complained about the cases being brought on his watch.
“Obama era investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job, Jeff,” the president tweeted.
Analysts, though, said the cases show any drop in prosecutions isn’t because of political influence.
“The Justice Department is not shying away from that because it is largely immune from political influence in these cases,” said Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University who has written books on public corruption. “You are not going to see a Justice Department official say, ‘Let’s go light on public officials and let them line their pockets.’”
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