Prosecutors in the Department of Justice, which handles public corruption, have been told that the unit will be significantly reduced in size and that its cases will be transferred to US law firms around the country, two people who are familiar with the case Tuesday said.
Discussions about shrinking the public integrity department come weeks after the unit’s leadership withdrew when an official in the supreme Ministry of Justice ordered the charges for corruption taxes against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
At the end of the Biden administration, there were about 30 prosecutors in the section, which was established in 1976 after the Watergate scandal to oversee criminal prosecution of federal public corruption cases across the country.
Prosecutors have been told that they will be asked to take on new tasks in the department and that as few as five lawyers may remain in the unit, the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were not authorized to discuss the move. US law offices around the country are expected to take on the cases that the section was prosecuted, the people said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said Tuesday that leadership “sees a broad look” on the agency’s resources, but has no final decisions made about the future of the section of public integrity.
The move seems to be part of a wider Trump administration effort to weaken or completely run protective frames designed to protect good government and fair play in business and politics.
The Ministry of Justice has already paused the enforcement of a decades old law prohibiting US companies from bribing foreign governments to win business and moved to wipe out high-profile cases of public integrity such as the against Adams and former Illinois government Rod Blagojevich, both Democrats.
In addition to the prosecution of the mismatch from public officials, the section supervises the department’s handling of electoral crimes such as voter fraud and campaign financing violations. According to the Biden administration, it was also home to election threats Task Force that was launched to fight a growing number of threats of violence against election workers.
The episode has been without leadership since five supervisors retired last month in the middle of the turmoil over the Adams case. Its acting boss, three vice -chiefs and a vice -assistant lawyer in the criminal department who monitored the section withdrew last month after the order to hand over the case from the then Deputy Lawyer Emil Bove.
Bove then summoned a call with the charges in the section and gave them an hour to choose two people to log on to the proposal to reject and said that those who did it could be promoted. After prosecutors got off the call with Bove, consensus among the group was that they would all resign. But a veteran prosecutor stepped up to sign the movement of concern about the young people’s jobs in the device.
It has been one of the department’s most prestigious sections for decades with a list of prominent alumni, including former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein and Jack Smith, who led the unit years before being appointed special adviser to investigate President Donald Trump.
The section got a reputation hit with the rejected prosecution of the late Alaska. Ted Stevens, a case rejected in 2009 by a federal judge who found that prosecutors had detained by defense attorneys evidence that was favorable to their case.
Smith was appointed in 2010 to rebuild the section and led the unit during a number of high-profile, but not always successful prosecutions in the corruption, including against former Virginia government Bob McDonnell, a Republican and former Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
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