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DOJ Won’t Prosecute Corporate Bribery Schemes Overseas
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday released a policy memo formalizing the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) retreat from enforcing the law when American corporations violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). A report today by the Wall Street Journal noted that nearly half of the DOJ’s FCPA investigations have been closed. Public Citizen’s Corporate Enforcement Tracker shows that five FCPA investigations and lawsuits against corporations have already been dismissed or withdrawn, and 16 are at risk, including investigations into Pfizer and Toyota, both of which donated $1 million to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Rick Claypool, a research director for Public Citizen, released the following statement:
“American corporations that engage in criminal bribery schemes abroad will no longer be prosecuted. That’s the bottom line of the new Trump policy on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This gift from the Trump administration to corrupt multinational corporations would be an outrage at any time, but it is particularly heinous that these authoritarians are simultaneously legalizing corporate crime while cheering the use of unrestrained excessive force against immigrants and protestors in Los Angeles.
“Like the Trump DOJ’s abandonment of Boeing’s prosecution for breaching the deal to clean up its act after the deadly 737 Max crashes, this retreat from enforcing laws against corporate crime is a perversion of justice that further concentrates the administration’s power to corruptly reward insiders and punish perceived enemies.”
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Fresh Fury as Schumer, Jeffries Bend on Demand to Unmask ICE Agents in Funding Talks
"Schumer needs to get the hell out," said Rep. Delia Ramirez. "He continues to demonstrate to us that he can't meet the moment."
Feb 05, 2026
Democratic leaders in Congress are already backing down on one of their key demands in the fight to reform the federal immigration agencies terrorizing Minnesota and other parts of the country.
On Wednesday, Democrats laid out a list of 10 "guardrails" they said they wanted to see put in place to protect the public from abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, before agreeing to a new round of funding for their parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The list called to "prohibit ICE and immigration agents from wearing face coverings" to conceal their identities, which Democratic leaders have stressed as a key reform for weeks.
But during a press conference on Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) raised many eyebrows when they introduced a heap of caveats to their demand.
“I think there’s agreement that no masks should be deployed in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, as has been the case, horrifying the American people,” Jeffries said.
Schumer added that agents “need identification and no masks, except in extraordinary and unusual circumstances.”
When a HuffPost reporter attempted to ask Schumer if the party had changed its position on masks, Schumer sidestepped the question. But other top Democrats clarified that they were looking at certain exceptions.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that while masks should generally be "prohibited by law" as a part of everyday enforcement, there are "sometimes safety reasons why you may need a mask."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who went against the majority of the party earlier this week to vote for two weeks of DHS funding to keep the government open, said they were discussing when to implement "narrow exceptions" with members of law enforcement and suggested that "dealing with a cartel" could be one of them.
Of course, the Trump administration has often asserted that all the immigrants they target are dangerous criminals—"the worst of the worst"—including cartel members, even when this is not the case, raising questions about who might be in charge of determining when masks are necessary.
Critics have been underwhelmed by many of the other demands on the list as well.
Journalist and commentator Adam Johnson said it was a collection of “mostly cosmetic, pointless, unenforceable, or actively harmful ‘reforms,’” with some—including the requirement for judicial warrants and a ban on racial profiling—already being mandated by the Constitution but flouted by agents regardless.
He described it as outrageous that Democrats were demanding "zero reduction in DHS’ obscene budget which... tripled, just 12 months ago."
Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis, the founder of the group Civil Rights Corps, called the list "one of the great political failures of our time" and said "it must be immediately denounced by all people of goodwill."
Meanwhile, Axios reported on Thursday that many rank-and-file members of the Democratic caucus are fuming over party leadership's refusal earlier this week to use the threat of a government shutdown to force reforms.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the CPC's chair emerita, pondered "'What are we going to get in 10 days that we didn't get?'"
"Every time that we are winning, we seem to somehow sabotage [it]," said Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).
She noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already ruled out several Democratic demands, including the requirement of judicial warrants.
ICE agents do not need a warrant to make arrests, but the Fourth Amendment prohibits them from entering private residences without a judicial warrant. An internal memo last month advised agents to ignore that law. Johnson said this week that requiring federal agents to obtain judicial warrants is "a road we cannot and should not go down.”
Other Democrats anonymously expressed their distrust in Schumer, who has caved in other hugely consequential fights in the second Trump era, most recently regarding the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies during last fall’s record-breaking government shutdown, which left tens of millions of Americans facing doubled health insurance premiums.
"The main feeling among members is a lack of trust in his strength and ability to strike a hard bargain," one anonymous Democrat said.
Another said, “All those spending bills, that is the most leverage,” adding that “many folks in the [House] Democratic caucus wish that we had more confidence in Schumer’s ability to navigate a good, tough deal.”
Sixty votes will be required for a deal to pass the Senate, meaning at least seven Democrats will need to join Republicans for DHS to receive full funding and avoid shutting down on February 14.
While this still gives Democrats some leverage to push demands, Ramirez said previous fights give her zero confidence in Schumer's willingness to hold the line.
"I'm gonna continue to tell you that Schumer needs to get the hell out over and over and over until he does," Ramirez said. "He continues to demonstrate to us that he can't meet the moment."
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'Crime Against Environment and Health': Israel Slammed for Dropping Toxic Glyphosate on Lebanon, Syria
"This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army," said watchdog Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Feb 05, 2026
The Lebanese president has accused the Israeli government of committing "a crime against the environment and health" for allegedly spraying the herbicide glyphosate on agricultural lands in Lebanon and Syria.
As reported by Naharnet on Wednesday, Lebanon's agriculture and environmental ministries recently conducted analysis of soil near the site where Israel had sprayed a chemical substance and found glyphosate "20 to 30 times higher than the average" in the area.
The ministries said that this level of glyphosate in the soil could cause "damage to agricultural production," while also harming soil fertility.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun denounced the spraying as a "flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty," and called on the United Nations (UN) and the international community at large to take action to stop future attacks.
Al-Jazeera reported on Tuesday that the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was warned by the Israel military on Monday to stay away from the border area because it planned to deploy a "nontoxic chemical substance" there, forcing the peacekeeping forces to cancel over a dozen planned activities.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, condemned Israel for preventing UNIFIL from conducting operations, emphasizing that "any activity that may put peacekeepers and civilians at risk is of serious concern."
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Wednesday that it has detected "Israeli aircraft spraying pesticides of unknown composition over farmland in the countryside of Quneitra in southern Syria" on January 26 and 27.
"This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army," the human rights watchdog said. "It forms part of a pattern of systematic destruction of agricultural land, including the burning of approximately 9,000 hectares during recent military operations using white phosphorus and incendiary munitions."
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Senators Demand Answers on Equifax Plan to 'Profiteer' Off GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements
"Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer," said one advocate.
Feb 05, 2026
Three of the US Senate's top critics of corporate greed and anticompetitive behavior are investigating a scheme by credit report firm Equifax that they say will allow the company to profit from Republican policies that are set to rip away healthcare coverage and food assistance from millions of Americans.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to Equifax CEO Mark Begor on Tuesday with several questions about the company's anticipated profits from provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that imposed work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Begor told investors last summer that the policy presented a "massive" business opportunity for Equifax, as a product owned by the company called the Work Number is used by many states to instantly verify the wages and work hours of Medicaid applicants.
At least 99 million workers across the country are covered by Equifax's database, which the company has filled with data through exclusive contracts with employers and payroll firms. Equifax has frequently imposed steep price hikes on the product and has been accused of having a monopoly on providing income data to state agencies.
North Carolina's Medicaid program was hit with a 24% price increase in 2022 and a 36% hike in 2024.
"We have very little leverage and recourse to back out," state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam told the New York Times in November.
Luke Farrell, a former employee of the US Digital Service under the Biden administration, told the Times that Equifax owns "a product that has become a core piece of the safety net. I’ve never seen another vendor do such price hikes across public benefits.”
With the new work requirements set to go into effect in January 2027, states will be required to check the database more frequently.
The OBBBA's $1 trillion in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid are projected to cause "over 5 million people to lose their health insurance and over 3 million people to pay higher grocery prices within the next few years," wrote the senators this week.
"But for Equifax, these new threats to Americans’ food assistance and health insurance coverage 'represent the chance to become a lot richer,'" they wrote, quoting the Times' article from November about Equifax's plan to price-gouge states.
The senators continued:
Because Equifax is already dominant in this market, the law’s new red tape requirements allow the company to consolidate power even further, using extractive contracts to price-gouge states, squeeze competitors, and drive up profits. In fact, Equifax is laying the groundwork to cash in by proactively building out a platform called “TotalVerify,” which is specifically marketed as a tool to help “Prepare Your Agency For H.R.1.” Equifax also pitched the platform as a “single-source” for states and government agencies to be able to verify employment, income, incarceration status, consumer address, and phone number history and claims to “help state and government agencies manage the complexities of SNAP and Medicaid programs.” Given that Equifax’s tight grip on this business has “border[ed] on a monopoly,” Equifax stands to gain even more as OBBBA’s red-tape requirements take effect nationwide.
The lawmakers noted that judging from history, the work requirements are unlikely to "be effective at anything but increasing red tape," as the vast majority of Medicaid and SNAP recipients who are eligible to work already do and states have already run "failed" experiments with Medicaid work requirements.
In 2018, Arkansas' program resulted in 18,000 low-income people losing coverage in under a year, with people who had no home internet access and those who qualified for an exemption from the work requirement most likely to lose their benefits.
"Now, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have expanded this policy in a move that will ensure more Americans get tangled up in red tape and lose essential healthcare coverage and food assistance as a result," wrote Warren, Wyden, and Sanders. "That these requirements could allow Equifax to profiteer off of this ‘solution’ [makes] them even more egregious."
Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, summarized the senators' objections to Equifax's price-gouging practices: "Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer. Meanwhile taxpayers will fund the bureaucratic lard."
The senators demanded to know Equifax's per-query costs for each state contract for the Work Number, the number of OBBBA-related contracts it expects to bid for in 2026 and 2027, the company's lobbying expenditures over the past five years for federal, state, and local governments, and whether Equifax plans to retain a clause in its contracts that allows it the “categorical right” to change prices with 30 days’ notice.
"Equifax’s long history of anti-competitive behavior," said the senators, "raises serious concerns about the company’s potential moves to price gouge states and taxpayers."
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