Trump Drops Bribery Charges Against FIFA After it Cooked Up a 'Peace Prize' Specially for Him

Donald Trump has moaned about not being given the Nobel Peace Prize, so the head of FIFA, the governing body for soccer’s World Cup tournament held every four years, cooked up a “FIFA Peace Prize” to give him, in violation of FIFA’s rules about political neutrality. Afterwards, the Trump administration suddenly dropped all charges in a case that exposed widespread corruption within FIFA.

The New York Times reports:

Hernán López, who was the chief executive of a unit that was responsible for developing Fox’s sports broadcasting business in Latin America, was convicted in 2023 of money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors had said Mr. López conspired to pay off the heads of national federations to win the rights to broadcast two South American soccer tournaments.

But on Tuesday, Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, wrote in a letter to the judge who oversaw the case against Mr. López and the Argentine marketing firm convicted along with him, Full Play Group, that dismissing it was in the interest of justice. …

It was another dramatic swing in a case that arose from a Justice Department investigation into corruption by international soccer officials. Federal investigators began probing corruption at FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, in 2010, but the case burst into the open with a series of high-profile arrests in Switzerland in 2015.

The most chilling part of this story is when López’s lawyer excuses his bribes by saying, “South America has different cultural norms and customs of gift-giving than the United States.” In other words, corruption there is normal—and soon will be here, based on the precedents set by the Trump administration.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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