The Justice Department Scaled Back Public-Corruption Enforcement Across 2025 and Into 2026, From the Eric Adams Dismissal to a Smaller Public Integrity Section to a Killed Probe of a Sitting Senator's Companies

Details

Over the course of 2025 and into 2026, the federal government's machinery for prosecuting public corruption was substantially dismantled. The clearest single measure comes from the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, the specialized unit created after Watergate to investigate and prosecute corrupt federal, state, and local officials. According to current and former officials who spoke with NPR, the section had around 35 to 40 attorneys when President Trump returned to office in January 2025; by the spring of 2026 it was down to roughly two full-time prosecutors. Over the same period its open caseload — investigations and charged cases — fell from about 175–200 matters to around 20.

The through-line is not a single decision but a change in how enforcement works. Cases that survive now tend to be ones the administration has no interest in stopping; cases touching political allies, or that the leadership deems politically inconvenient, are dropped, declined, or handed off to U.S. Attorney's offices where they often die. Enforcement that was meant to run on fixed rules — you prosecute corruption regardless of party — increasingly runs on discretion and access. This entry documents that shift in enforcement capacity. The related Foreign Corrupt Practices Act pause, the cancellation of corporate enforcement actions, and the wave of corruption pardons are tracked separately; they are referenced here only where they bear on the underlying enforcement question.

The Anchor: The Eric Adams Dismissal

The unraveling has a concrete starting point. In September 2024, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams on five counts including bribery, conspiracy, and campaign-finance violations. On February 10, 2025, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memo directing prosecutors to drop the case "without prejudice" — meaning charges could be revived later. Bove wrote that the department had reached this conclusion "without assessing the strength of the evidence," and cited Adams's "restricted" ability to assist the administration's immigration agenda as a reason to dismiss.

The acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon — a Trump appointee and former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia — refused. In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, she alleged that Adams's lawyers had "urged what amounted to a quid pro quo," offering the mayor's cooperation on immigration in exchange for dismissal, and warned it was "a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams's opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment." She resigned rather than file the motion. Adams's attorney Alex Spiro denied any quid pro quo, saying "we offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us." Shortly after Sassoon quit, Adams agreed to allow federal immigration agents into the Rikers Island jail complex.

Within hours, the resignations cascaded. The acting chief of the Public Integrity Section, John Keller; the acting criminal division chief, Kevin Driscoll; and several more Public Integrity prosecutors stepped down rather than execute the order. Hagan Scotten, the lead line prosecutor on the case, wrote in a blistering resignation letter to Bove: "I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me." In total, seven prosecutors quit. Bove accepted Sassoon's resignation and accused her of "insubordination."

A different prosecutor eventually filed the motion. But on April 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho dismissed the case with prejudice — permanently barring re-indictment, the opposite of what the department had requested. Ho wrote that "everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," and that "DOJ's immigration enforcement rationale is both unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep." He found the dismissal-without-prejudice structure would have left Adams "under the specter of reindictment at essentially any time, and for essentially any reason." Notably, Ho also rejected the department's claim that the original prosecution was tainted, finding "no evidence — zero" that the line prosecutors had improper motives.

The Adams episode is the template the rest of the pattern follows: a corruption case treated as a bargaining chip, career prosecutors removed or driven out for objecting, and a precedent set that charges can be traded for political cooperation. Keller, the resigning Public Integrity chief, later told NPR that "blowback over the Adams case prompted a wave of resignations and marked the start of the Public Integrity Section's gutting."

The Spine: Gutting the Public Integrity Section

The Public Integrity Section, or PIN, was established after Watergate to centralize the prosecution of politically sensitive corruption — the cases U.S. Attorney's offices are often poorly positioned to bring because they may involve local power brokers, sitting members of Congress, or officials the office works with daily. For 50 years it pursued bribery, kickback, and abuse-of-office cases against figures in both parties.

The headline figures bear repeating because they are stark. Per NPR's reporting, the section fell from roughly 35–40 attorneys to about two full-time prosecutors, and from around 175–200 open matters to roughly 20. The watchdog group CREW, tracking the same collapse, describes the section as "sidelined," with its staff cut "from more than 30 attorneys to five" and — critically — its ability to file new cases withdrawn. The precise headcounts differ slightly between sources, reflecting that this is being reconstructed from accounts of current and former officials rather than from a public personnel report, but the direction and magnitude are consistent across every account: a near-total hollowing-out.

CREW also flags a structural change that the raw numbers understate: the section's "gatekeeping role." Historically, PIN reviewed proposed corruption charges against members of Congress and other senior officials before they were filed, a check designed to keep politically motivated or legally weak prosecutions from going forward. According to CREW, that review function was suspended. The same unit that was a guardrail against partisan prosecution has been disabled in both directions — it can no longer reliably bring cases, and it no longer screens the ones that are brought.

The Justice Department did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the section's condition.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

The section's collapse sits inside a broader retreat from corruption enforcement that shows up in case-level decisions and in aggregate data.

Dropped prosecutions. On January 29, 2025 — before Bondi was even confirmed — the department moved to dismiss its case against former Nebraska Representative Jeff Fortenberry, who had been convicted in 2022 of lying to the FBI about illegal foreign campaign contributions before an appeals court overturned the conviction on a venue technicality and prosecutors re-charged him. The motion to drop the case "with prejudice" — barring any future administration from refiling — was brought by Ed Martin, the newly installed acting U.S. Attorney for D.C., and Trump praised the decision as ending a "Witch Hunt." Fortenberry still denies wrongdoing, and his defense had long argued the FBI call at issue was garbled by a bad cell connection; prosecutors had countered that he was told on tape that the $30,000 he received was likely illegal foreign money.

A closed bribery investigation into a sitting official. The most senior administration figure to benefit from the retreat was border czar Tom Homan. In September 2025, MSNBC reported that on September 20, 2024, FBI undercover agents posing as business executives had recorded Homan on hidden camera allegedly accepting $50,000 in cash after he indicated he could help steer future federal contracts their way if he became a top immigration official in a second Trump term. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section agreed to investigate in November 2024, and officials reportedly weighed conspiracy, bribery, and fraud charges. After Trump took office the case stalled, and FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche ultimately declared it closed, saying investigators had found "no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing." Homan called the report a "hit piece" and said, "I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal." The department has not released the recordings despite demands from Judiciary Committee Democrats, so their contents—and whether Homan's statements amounted to an agreement to accept a bribe—cannot be independently assessed; what is documented is that a bribery investigation into a senior administration official was opened by career prosecutors and then shut down under the officials Trump installed.

A killed criminal probe of a sitting senator's family companies. In June 2026, a ProPublica investigation with Mountain State Spotlight reported that the department had shut down a federal criminal investigation into Clean Water Act violations by Southern Coal and affiliated mining companies controlled by the family of Senator Jim Justice (R-WV), the billionaire former West Virginia governor. The probe grew out of a yearslong civil enforcement effort against the Justice family companies — run day-to-day by the senator's son, Jay Justice — whose operations had accumulated tens of thousands of alleged Clean Water Act violations over the preceding decade; a former environmental compliance chief for the companies, Robert Fowler, had alleged in a civil case that Jay Justice blocked spending needed for compliance, producing "near-daily violations" of water permit requirements. The criminal investigation involved the EPA, the DOJ Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia, and it had been approved by Robert Tracci, Trump's own top official in that district. Prosecutors had gathered evidence, reviewed civil trial testimony, subpoenaed documents, and approached former employees; people familiar with the investigation told ProPublica they had "a strong case." Then, in spring 2026, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General — headed by Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense lawyer, who in April 2026 became acting attorney general — ordered the probe shut down, with investigators told "pencils down." Justice is a sitting Republican senator whose vote the administration needs, and as of July 2026 there was no indication the probe had been revived; Senate Democrats cited the episode in broader complaints about politicized enforcement, and Representative Mike Levin wrote that the story "should be on the front page of every newspaper in America." The case is technically environmental rather than public-integrity enforcement, but it extends the same pattern documented elsewhere in this entry to a new tier: a criminal investigation of a sitting senator's business empire, judged strong by the prosecutors running it and approved by a Trump appointee, terminated from Justice Department headquarters.

Unwinding a conviction that served the administration's politics. The discretionary turn also runs in the opposite direction — toward leniency for those whose conduct aided the president's cause. Alexander Smirnov, a longtime FBI confidential informant with acknowledged ties to high-level Russian officials, fabricated the claim — memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form — that Burisma executives said they had paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each. That fabrication became the centerpiece of the House GOP's Biden impeachment inquiry and was amplified by Trump allies through 2023 and 2024. Special Counsel David Weiss indicted him; in December 2024 Smirnov pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents (along with tax charges), admitting he made up the bribery story, and on January 8, 2025 he was sentenced to six years in prison. Under the Trump administration, prosecutors moved to reexamine and unwind the case — Raw Story reported a person familiar with the matter saying the administration was "bending over backward" to free him — and in mid-2025 the Bureau of Prisons quietly released Smirnov from custody on a furlough after he had served only a few months of his sentence. The New Republic reported that he remained officially listed as a prisoner with no contact address and his whereabouts unknown — despite a court having deemed him a flight risk when it re-detained him in February 2024. Smirnov's case is not a corruption prosecution, but it belongs in this ledger because it completes the picture of what discretionary enforcement looks like: charges dropped or investigations killed for allies whose prosecution is inconvenient, and a conviction quietly relaxed for a man whose admitted lie about a Biden "bribe" was politically useful. Smirnov's was not the only manufactured Biden-bribery story to collapse in court. Patrick Byrne — the former Overstock CEO who had joined the December 18, 2020 Oval Office meeting pressing Trump to seize voting machines and challenge the election result — spent 2023 and 2024 claiming that Hunter Biden had secretly met Iranian officials in 2021 to negotiate an $800 million payment in exchange for persuading the administration to release frozen Iranian assets. In July 2026, after Byrne dismissed his legal team and failed to appear to defend the claim, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson entered a default judgment against him, finding that significant parts of his account of the supposed meeting had been fabricated rather than supported by any credible evidence, and awarded Hunter Biden $1.7 million in punitive damages. The Byrne verdict is a private defamation matter rather than a Justice Department action, but it belongs beside the Smirnov case as a second court repudiation of the fabricated "Biden bribe" narratives that Trump allies amplified through 2023 and 2024 — narratives the administration's enforcement choices treated as grievances to be redressed rather than fictions to be prosecuted.

The chilling effect on new cases. Keller described a quieter mechanism. After the 2024 election, he said, career prosecutors who had worked corruption investigations became "reluctant to move forward on cases that they thought would be unpopular with the incoming administration." The result, he told NPR, is "a chilling effect on specific cases" and "a chilling effect generally on prosecutors from pursuing public corruption cases at all" — compounded by a broader "resource drain" that makes the cases "practically more difficult to pursue for even the handful of agents and agencies that may still be willing to do them."

The aggregate picture. A ProPublica analysis of two decades of Justice Department data found the department declined more than 23,000 criminal cases in 2025, pursuing fewer prosecutions of nearly every category of crime — including corruption — than any incoming administration in its first six months going back to 2009, even as immigration prosecutions roughly tripled. In February 2025 alone, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in any month since at least 2004. The department declined over 900 federal program- or procurement-fraud cases, and roughly three times as many major-fraud-against-the-U.S. cases as the average for comparable periods under prior administrations. These figures span far more than public corruption, but they establish the environment: a department reallocating prosecutorial capacity away from white-collar and official-misconduct enforcement.

The corruption pardons (covered in a separate entry) form the third leg. The point relevant here is the signal they send down the chain of command. As Keller put it, "the pardons send a signal about priorities, and that has a trickle-down effect on enforcement." When a Las Vegas councilwoman convicted of stealing donations meant for a police memorial, a Virginia sheriff convicted of selling deputy badges, and a former Illinois governor convicted of trying to sell a Senate seat are all pardoned — and a senior pardon-process official, Ed Martin, posts "No MAGA left behind" — prosecutors absorb the message about which cases the leadership wants brought.

"Corroding Effect": What's at Stake

The durable cost is to capacity and norms rather than to any single defendant. Keller, the resigned section chief, framed the long-term risk: "If you don't have enforcement, what happens over time is the kind of corroding effect of public corruption leads to just a broken system of government where public officials are serving themselves first and then the public comes second."

Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault argued the administration's combined actions amount to a posture: "There's kind of a disdain for the very idea that corruption is a problem. They're acting as if corruption is simply not an issue, and people who were convicted of corruption were unfairly treated." Even a critic of overzealous enforcement, Cato Institute senior legal fellow Dan Greenberg, distinguished ordinary controversial pardons from what he sees now: previous administrations produced "a hailstone coming out of a clear blue sky," he said, while "what we have now is a hailstorm" of pardons that strike "any reasonable person" as "not just highly questionable but just obviously disturbing."

The posture Briffault describes reached an unusually explicit expression on June 26, 2026, when Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, recast Watergate itself — the scandal from which the Public Integrity Section, inspectors general, and much of modern government-ethics law descend. "If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story," Vance said, adding that "the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy." He described Watergate as a story of how "the deep state took down Richard Nixon," in a manner he said was "not all that different" from actions against Trump during his first term (AP coverage; video via RealClearPolitics). Commentators pushed back — MSNBC's Joe Scarborough challenged the "deep state" characterization, and an MSNBC opinion piece argued Vance misunderstands what Watergate established. The remarks are rhetoric, not policy, and are noted here as such. But they are a data point on where the administration's second-ranking official locates the founding precedent of the very enforcement architecture this entry documents being dismantled: not as a corruption scandal vindicating institutional checks, but as a deep-state operation that a healthier system would have shrugged off in a news cycle.

The Geographic Divide

The harm is not evenly distributed, and this is the most important nuance for assessing severity. Big-city U.S. Attorney's offices — the Southern District of New York, the Northern District of Illinois, the Central District of California — have the staff, expertise, and institutional muscle to build complex corruption cases without help from Washington. For corruption in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, the Public Integrity Section's decline changes relatively little.

The exposure concentrates in smaller states and rural areas. Public-corruption cases are, as current and former officials told NPR, "notoriously complex" and resource-intensive, and it was precisely in under-resourced jurisdictions that PIN historically stepped in with money and specialized expertise to hold state and local officials accountable. Keller's example: a former small-town Pennsylvania police officer convicted of bribery and of using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favorable treatment in prosecutions. "Because public integrity no longer exists, those cases aren't being done and there's no one to step into the shoes of the Public Integrity Section to do them," he said. The practical effect is a two-tier system: corruption in well-resourced metros may still be prosecuted, while corruption in the places least able to police their own officials goes unaddressed. The Southern Coal episode illustrates the same geography from another angle: the probe of the Justice family companies ran through the Western District of Virginia, a smaller office, and was killed from Washington — precisely the kind of case that, in the prior architecture, headquarters existed to support rather than suppress.

The Administration's Case

The administration and its allies do not describe this as a retreat from corruption enforcement. They describe it as a correction.

The argument rests on a genuine and contested premise: that the Justice Department under prior leadership was politically "weaponized" against Trump and his allies. On her first day as Attorney General, Bondi established a "Weaponization Working Group" to review what she called instances where the department's conduct "appears to have been designed to achieve political objectives or other improper aims rather than pursuing justice," singling out the investigations of Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith and New York state prosecutors. The underlying executive order asserted that the previous administration "engage[d] in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents." Bondi's parallel directives instruct prosecutors that charging decisions must reflect an "absence of personal or political motivation," and she wrote that "no one who has acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions has any cause for concern about our efforts to root out corruption and weaponization."

On this view, the pardons and dropped cases are not a license for corruption but a remedy. As NPR's Franco Ordoñez summarized the administration's position, the actions are framed as "less about excusing corruption and instead about rebalancing a justice system that has already lost a lot of public credibility." Defenders point out that controversial corruption-adjacent clemency is bipartisan — Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, Joe Biden's pardon of his son Hunter — and the White House made exactly that argument, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson telling NPR that "the only pardons anyone should be critical of are from President Autopen." In the Adams case specifically, the resource-allocation logic was made explicit: one defender of the dismissal argued the "thousands and thousands of man hours" a prosecution consumes "could better be used arresting violent criminals." And it is fair to note that resources genuinely were redirected toward immigration enforcement, which the administration ran on and won an election promising. The Smirnov case has its own version of this defense: his prosecution was brought by a special counsel originally appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, and an administration convinced that the prior department was weaponized could frame revisiting his conviction as part of the same correction.

There are real limits to this defense, however. Prior department leadership rejected the weaponization charge and pointed to the fact that the Biden-era Justice Department prosecuted prominent Democrats, including sitting Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar — hard to square with a theory that enforcement spared the president's opponents. The "rebalancing" framing also sits awkwardly against the same department's affirmative pursuit of Trump's named adversaries: indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were both thrown out by a federal judge over an invalid U.S. Attorney appointment, and an investigation into Representative Adam Schiff stalled (see the separate entry on the DOJ's pursuit of Trump's adversaries). A department that drops cases against allies while bringing — and losing — cases against opponents is difficult to characterize as merely neutralizing weaponization. The weaponization frame is also a poor fit for the Southern Coal decision: the criminal probe of the Justice family companies was approved by Trump's own U.S. Attorney and killed anyway, and Smirnov pleaded guilty in open court to fabricating the Biden bribery story, so his early release relieves a man whose crime is admitted, not contested. And the resource argument does not explain the suspension of PIN's pre-indictment gatekeeping function, which existed specifically to prevent political prosecutions.

Assessment

This is rated Net Negative — on balance a real but bounded and reversible setback to federal anti-corruption enforcement, not a permanent or department-wide dismantling.

The case for treating it as more severe is not trivial. Rebuilding a specialized prosecutorial unit is not like flipping a policy switch: institutional knowledge, source relationships, and trained personnel take years to reconstitute, and a generation of prosecutors has now seen colleagues forced out for declining to drop a corruption case. The 50-year-old gatekeeping function that screened politically motivated prosecutions has been disabled. The 2026 developments extend the pattern upward and outward: a criminal investigation touching a sitting senator's business empire — one prosecutors considered strong and a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney had approved — was killed from the Deputy Attorney General's office, and a convicted fabricator whose lie fueled an impeachment inquiry was quietly furloughed months into a six-year sentence. And the deeper change is to the principle that corruption enforcement runs on rules rather than on the defendant's relationship to power — a norm that, once broken, is observed by every official deciding whether their position protects them.

What keeps it from a higher rating is that the damage is bounded and reversible. No law has changed; corruption remains a federal crime, and a future administration could rebuild the Public Integrity Section, reverse the posture, and in principle revive investigations shut down without charges. PIN handles a specialized slice of cases; the 93 U.S. Attorney's offices bring most federal corruption prosecutions, and the largest — the Southern District of New York, the Northern District of Illinois, the Central District of California — retain the independent capacity to pursue the most consequential ones. The department-wide declinations figure spans all crime categories, not corruption specifically, so it describes the enforcement environment rather than measuring corruption cases lost. And the loss is hard to quantify at all: prosecutions never brought leave no record, so the number of corruption cases actually forgone can only be inferred from capacity and posture, not counted. The harm is real and concentrated in the under-resourced jurisdictions that relied on the Public Integrity Section most, and the trajectory through mid-2026 — Southern Coal, Smirnov, a vice president recasting Watergate as a deep-state plot — points in the wrong direction and is worth watching. But on the current record it is a bounded, reversible setback, not the kind of permanent structural break that would warrant a higher rating.