President Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House might have made life easier for fraudsters and financial criminals, but spare a thought for the poor attorneys who might otherwise have represented them in court.
“You wanna hear the biggest lie people here are going to tell you?” one lawyer told the American Bar Association’s annual white collar defense conference earlier in March, according to the Financial Times. “It’s that they’re busy.”
That’s because the second Trump administration has pursued fewer prosecutions for white-collar crimes over the past year than in any other since at least 1986, the FT reported Friday.
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Trump’s 2024 conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, to mention nothing of the sweeping 2023 civil fraud case that found him liable for inflating the value of his real estate holdings and net worth for more than a decade, makes him the only felon in U.S. history to have held the office of president.
The drop-off in white-collar prosecutions in his second term was likened by one attendee at the March conference to there being “no cops on the beat right now.” Now the lawyers who previously made hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year defending those accused of similar crimes, and who spent the event joking about having so little do that they had considering getting into other lines of work, are suffering.
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“In the short term, I think all of us should be developing in other practice areas,” Baruch Weiss, a trial lawyer and former federal prosecutor, told the FT, which notes that top partners at white collar law firms often bill for upward of $2,000 an hour.
Others offered a grave forecast for what the effective throttling of prosecutions may well mean going into the future, given the signal it has likely sent to criminals across the financial sector.
“My concern is that [less enforcement] may lead to a rise in crime or the lack of accountability in certain spaces,” Breon Peace, formerly a top federal prosecutor in New York, said at the conference.
Trump’s moves since assuming office for the second time last year have included an abrupt pause, followed by a complete overhaul, of laws that prohibit American companies from bribing foreign officials, as well as reassigning prosecutors to focus on immigration-related cases and ratcheting up requirements on the kind of evidence needed to pursue cryptocurrency related crimes.
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The Justice Department, which is among a number of legal and regulatory authorities whose workforces have drastically shrunk over the past year, has instead invested vast resources in bringing a slew of unsuccessful prosecutions against the president’s long-standing political adversaries.
The president himself has meanwhile made eager use of his pardon powers to annul or commute convictions and sentences for his fellow white-collar criminals, among them a cryptocurrency tycoon, Changpeng Zhao, whose digital asset exchange, Binance, has ties to the president’s family.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the DOJ for comment on this story.
