"Gordon Coburn and Steven Schwartz were on the verge of going to trial on charges of scheming to pay bribes in India when President Trump issued an executive order that put enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on hold.
It was a bolt of good luck for the former executives for Cognizant Technology Solutions, who had denied wrongdoing. The case had been dragging on for six years. Within two months, a new top prosecutor appointed by Trump dropped it.
"There was a tremendous sense of relief," said Lawrence Lustberg, a lawyer for Schwartz.
The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement, including cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets. In some cases, the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime.
Trump's executive order in February said bribery prosecutions hurt the ability of American companies to compete overseas, punishing them for practices that are routine in some parts of the world. That pronouncement could upend dozens of cases and investigations.
At the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered prosecutors to focus their anti-money-laundering and sanctions-evasion attention on drug cartels and international crime organizations.
A few themes are emerging: Prosecuting executives for wrongdoing that doesn't have obvious victims is out. The Justice Department is open to arguments that a defendant has been targeted for political reasons, or that some prosecutions undermine economic competitiveness and national-security interests. And political connections within Trump's world seem to matter.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said fighting sophisticated crime remains a priority. "White-collar enforcement focused on securing the integrity of U.S. markets and financial systems, tackling fraud, waste, and abuse, and recouping victims' losses is our focus," she said.
Some defense lawyers, encouraged by the shift, have urged prosecutors to drop cases or probes. Lawyers for Polymarket, the crypto-fueled online prediction market that forecast Trump's November win, are seeking an end to an investigation that began last year, according to people familiar with the matter. Defense contractor Boeing has sought the Justice Department's consent to back out of a proposed guilty plea related to two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets. The plea, reached at the end of the Biden administration, would require it to hire a compliance monitor for three years.
In some circumstances, defendants are arguing that their cases aren't consistent with Trump's foreign-policy and criminal-justice priorities.
Lawyers for Indian billionaire Gautam Adani are asking the Justice Department to drop criminal charges tied to an alleged foreign-bribery scheme against him and other executives of his companies, according to people familiar with the matter. The Adani Group has called the allegations "baseless."
Glencore, a Switzerland-based commodity trading giant that pleaded guilty in 2022 to charges of overseas bribery and market manipulation, got the Justice Department's support this year to end the work of two compliance monitors, which had cost the company $140 million.
Part of Glencore's argument: It is an important supplier to the U.S. of cobalt, a rare-earth mineral used in jet fighters, munitions, drones and electric-vehicle batteries. Chinese and American companies are in a race to source cobalt, and Trump signed an executive order seeking to make the U.S. "the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals."
Others have claimed to the Justice Department and the White House that they were victims of what the president decries as the weaponization of the justice system. That is one reason the department decided to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, over the objections of Manhattan federal prosecutors.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney's office has traditionally brought many of the government's most headline-grabbing white-collar cases. Its current rift with Washington has called that status into question.
Trump has granted clemency to several defendants convicted by the federal prosecutors in Manhattan. In late March, he pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton, a Trump donor convicted of defrauding investors by lying about the development of his company's zero-emissions trucks and technology.
He also pardoned three founders of the crypto exchange BitMEX, who had pleaded guilty to failing to maintain controls against money laundering. The president pardoned the company, too, saving it from a $100 million fine due to be paid that same day.
The enforcement retreat is occurring as Bondi and other senior officials clean house at the Justice Department, swapping out and sidelining career supervisors who were responsible for charging crimes such as corruption, price fixing and securities fraud.
The acting head of the department's criminal division was pushed out because, among other reasons, Bondi's top deputies were unhappy with her handling of the Adams case, according to people familiar with the matter. The head of that division's fraud section, which oversees foreign-bribery cases, was told via email last month that he was being replaced.
Several officials in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office have left or were placed on leave in the wake of the Adams rift. Its securities-fraud unit has put on hold some indictments that are a close call until a permanent U.S. attorney is sworn in, people familiar with the matter said.
Federal prosecutors are taking note of Trump's dislike of the overseas-bribery law. The newly installed U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, formerly a Trump adviser and one of his defense lawyers, moved to dismiss charges against the former Cognizant executives accused of paying bribes in India. Her decision undercut prosecutors in that office who had received approval in February -- before she took over -- to proceed to trial, according to an internal Justice Department memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The White House fired a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who had been overseeing a fraud case against Andrew Wiederhorn, the chief executive of burger-chain operator Fat Brands and a donor to Trump and other Republicans. Wiederhorn pleaded not guilty. The prosecutor, Adam Schleifer, was terminated after a right-wing activist, Laura Loomer, questioned an anti-Trump tweet he wrote in 2020, when he was a candidate for Congress.
Federal prosecutors around the country said in interviews that they are thinking about how to refashion existing cases and investigations to be consistent with Trump's priorities. Some U.S. attorneys' offices are considering putting more prosecutors on issues that Bondi thinks need attention, such as cases in which the government was defrauded by contractors. One senior prosecutor said he was looking to direct more resources to fighting fraud against senior citizens.
Some foreign-bribery prosecutors in Washington, unsure whether they can work on their own investigations, have started working on healthcare-fraud probes, according to defense attorneys and other people familiar with the matter. Healthcare fraud, including illegal prescriptions of opioids and Medicare overbilling, appears to be a priority for the Trump administration.
The Securities and Exchange Commission also enforces the foreign-bribery law. The chief of its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit, and his deputy director, were part of a wave of officials who took a buyout offer intended to slim down the 4,500-employee agency. Acting SEC Chairman Mark Uyeda said the agency is reviewing how to proceed in FCPA cases and wants "to make sure that we're uniformly applying and enforcing the laws."
The SEC also has dropped lawsuits against crypto companies Coinbase and Kraken and trading firm Cumberland DRW. The lawsuits had alleged those companies failed to register with the agency and were operating illegally. The cases were the cornerstone of a Biden administration effort to regulate most cryptocurrencies as securities.
The SEC said in a court filing it was pausing a lawsuit against Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto magnate it had accused in March 2023 of market manipulation and fraud. Sun had asked a court to dismiss the claims, saying his firm's trading was legitimate and his activity took place overseas, leaving the SEC without authority over him.
A few weeks after Trump was elected, Sun invested $30 million in crypto company World Liberty Financial, owned by the Trump family.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is scaling back its own caseload. Caroline Pham, its acting chairwoman, said last month that the agency had closed a third of open investigations since she took over in January. She added that trading firms had an opportunity to propose settlement offers during a 30-day "sprint" during which the commission would dispose of more investigations of record-keeping and regulatory reporting violations.
Some of the closed investigations had focused on decentralized exchanges, which allow trading and lending of cryptocurrency derivatives through automated software protocols, according to people familiar with the matter. During the Biden administration, some of the CFTC's biggest enforcement actions were against exchanges Binance and BitMEX, which it said illegally offered crypto derivatives to American traders.
While the shifting approach to enforcement stands to help white-collar defense lawyers on the current cases, some are getting worried that future work will dry up if the administration fully retreats from foreign-bribery investigations and complex Wall Street probes.
"The bar is very concerned there is going to be a cutback in these kinds of investigations," said Bob Tarun, a former prosecutor and retired partner at global law firm Baker & McKenzie. "Firms that have a huge litigation practice and devote a lot of resources to internal investigations are going to be impacted."
Defending clients enmeshed in overseas bribery investigations has become a lucrative business for lawyers, forensic accountants and document-retention firms.
"Every major white-collar group is concerned that there will be a significant slowdown," said a partner at another large firm.
Another lucrative source of work for lawyers -- monitoring corporate compliance with laws that companies admitted to violating -- also looks to be in jeopardy.
Last month, the Justice Department told compliance monitors assigned to cases handled by the criminal division to pause their work and justify why it should continue, people familiar with the matter said.
One exception: cases in which companies admitted compliance breakdowns that allowed drug cartels to launder money." [1]
1. White-Collar Enforcement Recedes Under Trump --- Justice Department backs away from some cases involving foreign bribery, money laundering and crypto markets. Michaels, Dave; Vanderford, Richard; Fanelli, James. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 Apr 2025: A1.
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