DOJ

The Trump administration’s decision to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug marks a milestone for the cannabis industry, but experts and executives say it falls well short of ending the sector’s longstanding exile from the mainstream financial system.

The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies even as it has pledged to get tough on crime, according to U.S. Justice Department records.

U.S. officials on Wednesday struck at Southeast Asian scam compounds defrauding Americans and a global fentanyl supply chain, announcing criminal charges, sanctions, and the seizure of hundreds of fraudulent websites in a pair of coordinated enforcement actions.

The founder of a Newnan, Georgia-based lender that marketed faith-based investments to conservative audiences was charged with felony wire fraud on Thursday, escalating a civil fraud case into a criminal prosecution nearly a year after regulators shuttered what they described as a $140 million Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges that the civil-rights organization fraudulently paid informants inside extremist groups and concealed those payments with bank accounts opened for nonexistent companies. 

IBM agreed to pay $17 million to resolve allegations by the Trump administration that its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies discriminated against employees and job applicants, in the first settlement secured under the Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Fraud Initiative.

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to participating in a two-year, multimillion-dollar black-market peso exchange conspiracy that laundered drug trafficking proceeds through Texas to Mexico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

Jeffrey Epstein received $25 million in late 2015 for consulting work tied to a U.S. Justice Department tax-evasion settlement with Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group.

Trump’s crackdown on “debanking” is colliding with a core compliance problem for U.S. banks: the very policies his administration wants to curb have long given lenders a way to cut off customers they suspect of wrongdoing without violating federal secrecy rules.

Several senior Binance compliance officials overseeing sanctions, investigations, and financial-crime monitoring have left the company in recent months as the crypto exchange faces renewed scrutiny over alleged sanctions evasion and illicit-finance risks.