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BIDEN AND TRUMP’S LENIENCY ON CORPORATE CRIME  
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Freddy Brewster
April 19, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The federal government under Joe Biden prosecuted fewer corporate
crime cases than at any point in the last 30 years. Now the Trump
administration is set to drop or pause more than 100 enforcement
actions against corporate misconduct. _

Joe Biden meets with Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White
House on November 13, 2024, in Washington, DC., Alex Wong / Getty
Images

 

The federal government under President Joe Biden prosecuted fewer
corporate crime cases than at any point in the last three decades.
White-collar criminal prosecutions hit a thirty-year low in recent
years, according to data shared exclusively with the_ Lever_.

A new report
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by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen shows that under President
Joe Biden, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted just eighty
cases of corporate crime in 2024, down from 300 in 2000 during Bill
Clinton’s administration.
In 2022, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco — a former corporate
consultant
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who lobbied on behalf of Boeing and then oversaw
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the Biden administration’s now-defunct
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sweetheart deal with the plane manufacturer — said
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that the Justice Department needs “to do more and move faster”
when it comes to cracking down on corporate crime.

Instead these prosecutors oversaw one of the most lenient eras in
modern history for corporate crime, with the Biden Justice Department
bringing “fewer prosecutions against corporations than any of the
previous four US presidents,” Public Citizen notes in its report.

On its way out the door, the Biden administration gave corporate
criminals a gift
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by allowing firms to avoid punishment and keep significant profits if
they self-report their own wrongdoings. Depending on how it is
implemented, the self-reporting policy “effectively affirms that
corporations are above the law,” Public Citizen said.

Even with dwindling enforcement rates, since 2000, corporations have
been forced to return more than $1 trillion
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to citizens and the government in penalties, fines, and settlements
for breaking the law. Now thanks to Biden, they’ll get to hang on to
even more of their record profits
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With his predecessor laying the groundwork, Donald Trump has directed
his administration to drop
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or pause more than one hundred enforcement actions against corporate
misconduct. “Now the Trump administration is in power, and the
message that corporate lawbreakers will be off the hook is clear —
especially when those corporate lawbreakers are in favored industries
or are administration insiders,” Public Citizen notes.
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism
project, the_ Lever_, here [[link removed]].

Freddy Brewster is a freelance reporter and has been published in the
Los Angeles Times, NBC News, CalMatters, the Lost Coast Outpost, and
other outlets across California.

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* white collar crime
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* corporate crime
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