Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has marked a stark shift in white-collar crime enforcement, with federal prosecutors and investigators stepping back from complex foreign-bribery, money-laundering, and corruption cases, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The shift has coincided with a broad unwinding of prominent prosecutions from the prior administration, including decisions by prosecutors to drop charges in some pending cases and a series of Trump pardons for executives and other defendants convicted of, or charged with, business-related crimes, according to the newspaper. 

“What we’ve seen so far in the first year of Trump’s second term is a more aggressive retreat across all spectrums of white-collar crime” than during his previous term, Will Thomas, a University of Michigan business-law professor, told the Journal. The shift is likely to impact corporate-governance and compliance practices, he told the newspaper. 

Among the biggest changes has been the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a 1977 law barring businesses from paying bribes to representatives of foreign governments in exchange for winning lucrative contracts. 

The U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which share authority to investigate FCPA violations, brought approximately 33 cases per year against companies or individuals between 2015 and 2024, according to data maintained by law firm Gibson Dunn cited by the Journal. 

In 2025, by contrast, the Justice Department brought six new FCPA cases and the SEC brought none. The drop follows an order by Trump early last year to freeze new FCPA cases for a 6-month period, and the subsequent decision by the Justice Department to close nearly half of open foreign-bribery investigations, the Journal said. 

Such prosecutions, the Trump administration said, should be tied to U.S. strategic interests, including the fight against transnational drug trafficking. 

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the department has also pulled back from Biden-era anti-money laundering enforcement against large cryptocurrency exchanges accused of enabling sanctions evasion, according to the report. 

Federal prosecutors have separately scaled back fraud and corruption cases linked to public officials, including by dropping the Justice Department’s prosecution of then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams on bribery charges. The department separately shrank its anti-corruption division from 30 prosecutors to two full-time attorneys, the Journal reported. 

At the FBI, Director Kash Patel disbanded a corruption squad that had investigated members of Congress and fraud by federal employees. A Patel spokesman told the Journal the squad was disbanded due to evidence of unethical conduct and political targeting. 

In some cases, white-collar investigations have unraveled to shift resources toward other priorities. 

An ongoing probe into whether employees of financial-services firm StoneX stole trade secrets from a competitor has stalled not because of a lack of evidence but because investigators have been reassigned to immigration cases and other matters, according to the report, which also outlines the administration’s renewed focus on healthcare- and tariff-related prosecutions and the impact of Trump’s pardons. 

Read more at The Wall Street Journal

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