The Trump administration is gutting the Justice Department’s unit that oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption, three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told NBC News.
The unit, the Public Integrity Section, has overseen some of the country’s most high-profile and sensitive prosecutions. Now, though, only a small fraction of its employees will remain, and the unit will no longer directly handle investigations or prosecutions, two sources said.
Prosecutors in the unit, which had housed dozens of employees, are being told to take details to other positions within the department. Its current cases will be reassigned to U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country.
David Laufman, a former head of the DOJ’s counterintelligence section who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, questioned the move.
“The only reasonable interpretation of this extraordinary action is that the administration wants to transfer responsibility for public corruption cases from career attorneys at Main Justice to political appointees heading U.S. attorney’s offices,” Laufman said.
The decision, he added, raises “serious questions about whether future investigations and prosecutions will be motivated by improper partisan considerations.”
The Justice Department’s leaders are “taking a broad look” at its structure, a spokesperson for the department said, but cautioned that nothing had been finalized.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump accused the Justice Department of conducting politically motivated criminal investigations of him. After he took office, Trump signed an executive order calling for ending the “weaponization” of the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement agencies.
Biden administration Justice Department officials denied Trump’s claims. They said that their investigations were conducted fairly and that they were caused by Trump’s own actions. They also noted the convictions of multiple Democrats, including former Sen. Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, on corruption charges during President Joe Biden’s term.
Several officials resigned from the Public Integrity Section last month when the Justice Department moved to drop its corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
After federal prosecutors in New York refused to drop the charges, Trump appointees at Justice Department headquarters in Washington asked members of the Public Integrity Section to do so.
John Keller, the acting head of the section, refused to drop the Adams charges and resigned, two sources said. Three other members of the section also resigned.
The next day, Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, held a video meeting with other members of the Public Integrity Section. Bove urged one of them to sign a filing asking a judge to dismiss the charges against Adams.
A senior litigation counsel with the section, Edward Sullivan, ultimately signed the filing. Sullivan decided to sign it to protect his colleagues, a person familiar with the matter said.
Prosecutors noted that Trump administration Justice Department officials were not permanently dropping the charges against Adams. Instead, they were moving to dismiss the indictment “without prejudice,” a legal maneuver that would allow federal prosecutors to restore the charges at any time — for instance, if Adams were to stop cooperating with Trump’s immigration policies.
Long-standing Justice Department guidelines bar prosecutors from using the threat of federal criminal prosecution to blackmail Americans — from ordinary citizens to powerful elected officials — into carrying out their wishes.
Created in 1976 after the Watergate scandal, the Public Integrity Unit supervises investigations and prosecutions of allegations of corruption in federal, state and local government by elected and appointed officials, including judges.
It also supervises investigations and prosecutions of election crimes, including voter fraud and campaign finance offenses.