Donald Trump’s second administration has already turned into a paradise for financial crime; he cut back enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and has pardoned plenty of white-collar criminals. But the president is clearly not content with turning a blind eye to corruption while he is in office. Now his Treasury Department is shutting down a registry of shell-company ownership to make future enforcement efforts by local law enforcement or future administrations much more difficult.
The Bulwark reports:
This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily “follow the money” when investigating crimes. Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either. “It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,” former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark. …
The result, financial experts say, is that law enforcement officials will have fewer leads available when tracking down fraudsters and cartels. “Before today, bad actors probably thought that there was still a chance of being caught by the reporting,” said Richard Berner, codirector of New York University’s Volatility and Risk Institute and former director of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research. “Now there’s zero chance.”
Presidential pardons don’t cover civil actions or state prosecutions. With this action, Trump will make it even harder to pursue future consequences for business crimes committed by corporations, individuals, or rich families (once they are out of power).
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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