The U.S. Department of Justice will refocus much of its staff and resources on the “total elimination” of drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations in the United States while disbanding units dedicated to prosecuting white-collar crime and kleptocrats and tracking foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections.
The change, announced in a set of memos issued this week by newly sworn-in Attorney General Pam Bondi, is part of a major reorientation of a department that President Donald Trump says has been “weaponized” against him since the end of his first term in office.
In a memo issued Wednesday, her first day in office, Bondi called for a “fundamental change in mindset and approach” when it comes to combating drug cartels.
“We must do more than try to mitigate the enormous harms these groups cause in America,” Bondi wrote. “It is not enough to stem the tide of deadly poisons, such as fentanyl, that these groups distribute in our homeland. Rather, we must harness the resources of the Department of Justice and empower federal prosecutors throughout the country to work urgently with the Department of Homeland Security and other parts of the government toward the goal of eliminating these threats to U.S. sovereignty.”
Kleptocracy programs eliminated
The same memo outlined Bondi’s moves to do away with specific units in the department.
Among those eliminated were two dedicated to targeting kleptocrats — public figures who use their authority to steal resources from their own people.
The Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, established in 2010, worked to identify the assets of kleptocrats, seize them and return them to the countries from which they were stolen.
Task Force KleptoCapture, a separate unit, was formed in early 2022 in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The unit targeted oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and enforced sanctions against Russia by the U.S. and its allies after the invasion.
“Attorneys assigned to those initiatives shall return to their prior posts,” Bondi’s memo said, “and resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels and TCOs.”
The Criminal Division’s unit focused on bringing prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, she said, “shall prioritize investigations related to foreign bribery that facilitates the criminal operations of Cartels and TCOs, and shift focus away from investigations and cases that do not involve such a connection.”
In 2024 alone, the FCPA unit secured hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement payments from companies found guilty of bribing public officials.
Prosecutions under the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act were also redirected under the new instructions.
Anticorruption groups concerned
Gary Kalman, the executive director of Transparency International U.S., told VOA that the changes to DOJ priorities could have dire consequences for the global fight against public corruption.
“The elimination of kleptocracy initiatives is a concern in that those initiatives were providing valuable coordination and information-sharing services amongst different departments and with some of our overseas allies,” Kalman said.
“Those networks had some encouraging results and enabled investigations to move more quickly,” he said. “Dismantling those programs will likely have a negative effect on our ability to investigate and prosecute cases.”
Regarding the change in focus for FCPA and FEPA investigations, Kalman said, much will depend on how the administration chooses to define “transnational criminal organizations.”
FCPA and FEPA violations “are by nature, transnational crimes,” he pointed out. So, he said, it’s difficult to know for sure what kind of investigations will be prioritized.
“For example, do they consider the Iranian government an ‘organization’?” he asked.
In an analysis of the Justice Department’s moves, a group of attorneys at the law firm Arnold & Porter argued that the department’s new posture might lead to more FCPA cases.
“FCPA enforcement might actually increase, at least in certain areas,” they wrote. “For example, DOJ might more aggressively prosecute FCPA violations related directly to Mexico and other Latin American countries, as well as China — places that the Trump administration has identified publicly as sources of transnational criminal activity, including trafficking of illegal narcotics.”
Foreign influence prosecutions refocused
In a separate memo, Bondi revealed that the Department of Justice will also disband the Foreign Influence Task Force, established in 2017 to investigate efforts by state actors, such as Russia and China, to influence U.S. public opinion, particularly around elections.
Trump has been highly critical of efforts by law enforcement to identify and root out foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially after a report by special counsel Robert Mueller, in 2019, found extensive evidence that Russian influence operations had been mounted to benefit Trump’s candidacy during the 2016 presidential election.
In her memo, Bondi wrote, “To free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion, the Foreign Influence Task Force shall be disbanded.”
Election integrity advocates were dismayed by the decision.
Susannah Goodman, the director of election security for the activist organization Common Cause, said in a statement that the decision to disband FITF is a “terrible mistake” that will leave state and local election infrastructure without critical support.
“The FITF provides critical protection to safeguard our votes and our elections from the intelligence services of hostile foreign governments including Russia, China and Iran,” Goodman said.
“We know that foreign governments have been interfering in our elections for decades and even more expansively beginning during the 2016 election cycle. It is hard to imagine a more pressing priority than protecting our elections from foreign interference,” she said.
“States and local officials — who run our elections — do not have the resources and expertise to go toe-to-toe with highly sophisticated foreign intelligence services,” she said.