'Disgraceful': Trump DOJ Guts Unit That Targets Corruption by Public Officials

Weeks after the Trump administration pressured the U.S. government's top anti-corruption prosecutors to drop charges of bribery and other federal crimes against New York Mayor Eric Adams, the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice is set to be almost entirely dismantled.

As NBC News reported late Tuesday, the office tasked with investigating and prosecuting allegations of corruption by elected officials will soon be disbanded, with only a few Public Integrity Section employees remaining and the unit no longer directly handling investigations and corruption cases.

Prosecutors will be reassigned elsewhere in the DOJ and pending cases will be moved to U.S. attorneys' offices across the country—signaling that partisan political appointees instead of civil servants who have worked under both Republican and Democratic presidents will now oversee corruption cases.

The move was denounced as "disgraceful" by political scientist Norman Ornstein and as evidence that President Donald Trump is "for corruption" by Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Last month, several officials resigned from the Public Integrity Section after objecting to what they said was a proposed "quid pro quo" under which Adams would assist with the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts if charges against him were dropped.

Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, gathered the unit's attorneys and pushed them to sign a filing asking for the charges to be dismissed. Edward Sullivan, a senior litigation counsel, signed the filing to save his colleagues' jobs.

The Public Integrity Section, which also oversees election-related crimes and campaign finance offenses, has prosecuted both Democratic officials, including former Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and Republicans such as former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Trump has claimed the Justice Department under former President Joe Biden conducted politically motivated investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—even though the cases were handed over to Special Counsel Jack Smith when Trump announced his 2024 campaign.

Now Trump's dismantling of the anti-corruption unit, former DOJ counterintelligence official David Laufman told NBC, raises "serious questions about whether future investigations and prosecutions will be motivated by improper partisan considerations."

"The only reasonable interpretation of this extraordinary action," said Laufman, "is that the administration wants to transfer responsibility for public corruption cases from career attorneys at Main Justice to political appointees heading U.S. attorneys' offices."