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The Trump administration is slashing the size of the Justice Department’s unit that oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption, three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told NBC News.
Only a small fraction of the section’s employees — roughly a half-dozen — will remain in an office that, until recently, oversaw all federal public corruption cases nationwide and housed dozens of employees, two sources said.
Prosecutors in the Washington-based unit, the Public Integrity Section, are being told to take details to other positions within the department.
The Public Integrity Section will now be a non-litigation section and no longer directly handle investigations and prosecutions, two sources said. Its current cases will be reassigned to U.S. attorney’s offices around the country.
David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, questioned the move.
“The only reasonable interpretation of this extraordinary action is that the administration wants to transfer responsibility for public corruption cases from career attorneys at Main Justice to political appointees heading U.S. attorney’s offices,” Laufman said.
The decision, he added, raises “serious questions about whether future investigations and prosecutions will be motivated by improper partisan considerations.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump accused the Justice Department of conducting politically motivated criminal investigations of him. After he took office, Trump signed an executive order calling for ending the “weaponization” of the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement agencies.
Biden administration Justice Department officials denied Trump’s claims. They said that their investigations were conducted fairly and that they were caused by Trump’s own actions. They also noted the convictions of multiple Democrats, including former Sen. Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, on corruption charges during President Joe Biden’s term.
Several officials resigned from the Public Integrity Section last month when the Justice Department moved to drop its corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
After federal prosecutors in New York refused to drop the charges, Trump appointees at Justice Department headquarters in Washington asked members of the Public Integrity Section to do so.
John Keller, the acting head of the section, refused to drop the Adams charges and resigned, two sources said. Three other members of the section also resigned.
The next day, Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, held a video meeting with other members of the Public Integrity Section. Bove urged one of them to sign a filing asking a judge to dismiss the charges against Adams.
A senior litigation counsel with the section, Edward Sullivan, ultimately signed the filing. Sullivan decided to sign it to protect his colleagues, a person familiar with the matter said.
Prosecutors noted that Trump administration Justice Department officials were not permanently dropping the charges against Adams. Instead, they were moving to dismiss the indictment “without prejudice,” a legal maneuver that would allow federal prosecutors to restore the charges at any time — for instance, if Adams were to stop cooperating with Trump’s immigration policies.
Long-standing Justice Department guidelines bar prosecutors from using the threat of federal criminal prosecution to blackmail Americans — from ordinary citizens to powerful elected officials — into carrying out their wishes.
Created in 1976 after the Watergate scandal, the Public Integrity Unit supervises investigations and prosecutions of allegations of corruption in federal, state and local government by elected and appointed officials, including judges.
It also supervises investigations and prosecutions of election crimes, including voter fraud and campaign finance offenses.
Ryan J. Reilly is a justice reporter for NBC News.
Sarah Fitzpatrick is a senior investigative producer and story editor for NBC News. She previously worked for CBS News and “60 Minutes.”
David Rohde is the senior executive editor for national security at NBC News. A Pulitzer Prize winner who previously worked at the New York Times and the New Yorker, his latest book is Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI and the War on Democracy.
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