US Justice Department expected to slash public corruption unit

Prosecutors in the US Justice Department section that handles public corruption cases have been told the unit will be significantly reduced in size, and its cases will be transferred to US attorney's offices around the country, two people familiar with the matter have said.

The discussions about shrinking the public integrity section come weeks after the unit's leadership resigned when a top Justice Department official ordered the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.

In the final days of the Biden administration, there were about 30 prosecutors in the section, which was created in 1976 following the Watergate scandal to oversee criminal prosecutions of federal public corruption cases across the country.

Prosecutors have been told they will be asked to take new assignments in the department and as few as five lawyers may remain in the unit, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss the move. US attorney's offices around the country are expected to take on the cases that the section was prosecuting, the sources said on Tuesday, 11 March.

A department spokesperson on Tuesday said leadership is "taking a broad look" at the agency's resources but no final decisions have been made about the future of the public integrity section.

The move appears to be part of a broader Trump administration effort to weaken or altogether dismantle guardrails designed to protect good government and fair play in business and politics.

The Justice Department has already paused enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business and moved to wipe away high-profile public integrity cases like those against Adams and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, both Democrats.

In addition to prosecuting misconduct by public officials, the section oversees the department's handling of election crimes such as voter fraud and campaign finance offenses.

Under the Biden administration, it was also home to the election threats task force, which was launched to combat a growing number of threats of violence against election workers.

The section has been without leadership since five supervisors resigned last month amid the turmoil over the Adams case. Its acting chief, three deputy chiefs and a deputy assistant attorney-general in the criminal division who oversaw the section resigned last month after the order to drop the case from then deputy attorney-general Emil Bove.

Bove then convened a call with the prosecutors in the section and gave them an hour to pick two people to sign onto the motion to dismiss, saying those who did so could be promoted. After prosecutors got off the call with Bove, the consensus among the group was that they would all resign. But a veteran prosecutor stepped up to sign the motion out of concern for the jobs of the younger people in the unit.

It has for decades been one of the department's most prestigious sections, with a roster of prominent alumni including former attorney-general Eric Holder, former deputy attorney-general Rod Rosenstein and Jack Smith, who led the unit years before being appointed special counsel to investigate President Donald Trump.

The section took a reputational hit with the botched prosecution of late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, a case that was dismissed in 2009 by a federal judge who found that prosecutors had withheld from defence lawyers evidence that was favourable to their case.

Smith was appointed in 2010 to rebuild the section and led the unit during the course of a series of high-profile but not always successful corruption prosecutions, including against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, and former Democrat Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.