It's Time for Crypto to Leave Lithuania for the USA: White-Collar Enforcement Recedes Under Trump --- Justice Department backs away from some cases involving foreign bribery, money laundering and crypto markets

"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.

Patirsime tam tikrą diskomfortą dėl JAV reindustrializavimo.

 Tačiau turėtume būti patenkinti, kad parazitai, kurie gyveno iš pigaus Meksikos, Kinijos, Indijos, Vietnamo, Bangladešo ir kitų šalių gyventojų darbo ir atgabena mums šio darbo vaisius, nukentės daug labiau. Laikas nustoti žlugdyti JAV – stiprią Vakarų lyderę.

We will have some discomfort in the re-industrialization of the USA.

We should be satisfied that parasites who were living from cheap Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other workers' labor and bringing in us the fruits of this labor will suffer much more though. It is time to stop ruining the USA - the strong leader of the West.

Today only magic can make an iPhone in the USA. Market magic, supported by Trump's tariffs. Biden's money from the government cannot do it

"The year is 2030. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook takes the stage, waves his new Apple Magic Wand, shouts "Apple-cadabra!" and yanks off a black cloth.

It's the made-in-America iPhone! Built with lots of money, people, time. . .and pixie dust.

President Trump's long-term goal is to reshore high-tech manufacturing to the U.S., including Apple's cash cow.

"The army of millions and millions of human beings, screwing in little screws to make iPhones -- that kind of thing is going to come to America," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS's "Face the Nation" recently. "It's going to be automated," he added.

Except iPhones contain a patchwork of sophisticated parts, sourced from many countries and put together primarily in China, where electronics manufacturing has been perfected over a generation. America doesn't have facilities that resemble Chinese ones, nor does it have skilled manpower to assemble iPhones at that scale.

So we assembled a panel of manufacturing and technology experts to find out how hard it would be for Apple to bring iPhone production to the U.S. The short answer? It's easier to teach a bald eagle to use a screwdriver.

They unanimously agreed. Building the full stack of iPhone components and assembling it in the U.S.? Impossible. But shifting some manufacturing here? Not totally insane.

Mixed signals from the Trump administration over the weekend regarding tariffs on smartphones, laptops and other electronics have also fueled fresh uncertainty over U.S. trade policy.

Apple declined to comment on the possibility of making an iPhone in the U.S. So come dream with us. Here's what it would take to build an iPhone -- or at least some of it -- in the land of the free.

Global effort

There are parts from over 40 different countries inside an iPhone with the most complex and specialized components coming from about half a dozen, says Gary Gereffi, an emeritus professor at Duke University who has spent decades studying global manufacturing.

Right now, many of those parts are made in -- or near -- China, which benefits from its proximity to Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

The only realistic path to U.S. iPhone assembly is to reconstruct its supply chain by shifting some of its key component manufacturing to the broader North American region, says Gereffi, with some parts made in Mexico and Canada -- maybe even Western Europe. If a U.S. assembly operation were to start in the next three to five years, however, it would depend on parts from Asia, too.

When Apple began building the Mac Pro desktop in the U.S., one of the first roadblocks was sourcing enough parts -- including screws -- close to home.

Even if funding were no object -- and we'll get to that -- Gereffi estimates it would take three to five years to build out the scale and quality required for us to join hands in a big American manufacturing kumbaya.

Skilled makers

Speaking of hands, iPhone assembly in the U.S. would require a dramatically increased number of them -- both human and robotic.

It wouldn't be impossible to buy the manufacturing equipment required, but getting enough people who are able to run it might be, says Tinglong Dai, a business professor at Johns Hopkins University, who studies global supply chains.

"We have a severe labor shortage," he says, "and we've lost the art of manufacturing at scale."

Foxconn, which assembles iPhones, has said it employs 300,000 workers in Zhengzhou, China, aka "iPhone City."

Apple plans to source more iPhones assembled in India, according to a Wall Street Journal report. India, too, has a large manufacturing workforce.

The U.S. doesn't. Hiring is one of the biggest problems facing existing American factories.

Then there's the skills gap.

In a 2017 interview with Fortune, Cook said the incentive to build in China wasn't cheap labor. "The products we do require really advanced tooling," he said, nodding to the sophisticated iPhone-making equipment.

"In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."

Robots can help with packaging and testing, but tasks such as routing cables, adding glue and yes, screwing in little screws, still require humans, Dai says.

Mountains of money

All of this is going to take moolah. Lots and lots of it. President Trump has pointed out Apple's willingness to spend $500 billion on U.S. manufacturing. But the company's commitment is largely for a factory in Houston intended to make AI servers, not iPhones.

Apple would have to spend more to build out the manufacturing ecosystem for an All-American iPhone. And even if it did, would the company be able to maintain iPhone quality while selling them at today's prices?

"No," says, well, everyone.

A $1,000 iPhone made completely in the U.S. would be a low-quality product, at least at first, Dai says.

"The U.S. has the capacity to manufacture smartphone parts in some areas, but it is not the best across these areas." America would need to catch up on decades of expertise that Japan has with cameras, and South Korea has with displays, for instance.

There's momentum for American semiconductor manufacturing. TSMC, the world's largest chip maker and Apple's partner, promised to build several plants in Arizona. But for now the company's most advanced chips, including Apple's, can only be made in Taiwan.

In 2017, during Trump's first administration, Foxconn announced plans to build TV displays in Wisconsin at a 13,000-worker facility. It has drastically reduced its commitment -- creating only about 1,000 jobs.

Manufacturing costs turned out to be "four to five times more expensive" than in China, says Jeff Fieldhack, a research director at Counterpoint Research.

Before Trump's tariffs, Fieldhack estimates, Apple could make a U.S. operation in five years, assuming money was no object.

But here's the kicker: With new fees and tariffs threatening to jack up the cost of factory building materials -- lumber, steel and everything in between -- "It's way down the road now," he says.

Don't worry, Tim Cook's working on that Apple Magic Wand.

1. U.S.-Made iPhone Is Apple Pie in the Sky --- With uncertainty about tariffs and a push to bring back high-tech manufacturing, what would it take to make products here? Stern, Joanna; Nguyen, Nicole. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Apr 2025: A12.