Trump and Bondi are breaking America’s anti-corruption safeguards

It has rarely hurt a politician’s fortunes to insist that they will clean up their opponent’s rampant abuse of power. Claims of waste, fraud and corruption are part and parcel with American politics, dating back to the earliest days of the republic. But while the second Trump administration is saying many of the right words, its first month makes clear that far from combating bribery and other forms of corruption, it has moved to ignore, underplay, or even embrace a blossoming culture of kickbacks.

Case in point: New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted last year on corruption charges. Federal prosecutors accused Adams of currying favor with Turkish officials and foreign businesspeople in exchange for flight upgrades, airline tickets and illegal campaign donations. The alleged grift was relatively low stakes, but corruption is corruption, and America’s laws have been shaped over the years to combat even the smallest-scale acts of alleged bribery, especially when it comes from overseas. 

But on Monday, the Justice Department announced that it was asking prosecutors to drop the charges against Adams, framing the case as having unfairly impacted his coming bid to run for re-election this fall. The memo from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove went out of its way to include a footnote insisting that “the Government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement.”

But evidence of a quid pro quo has become clearer by the day. For starters, the DOJ announcement only came after Adams had reportedly told his commissioners in a Monday morning meeting not to criticize Trump or interfere with immigration enforcement in the city. Then, the mayor’s name was strangely missing from a list of New York officials the Justice Department sued on Wednesday over the state’s “sanctuary cities,” one of which Adams runs. “We’re hoping that in New York, that Mayor Adams is going to cooperate with us with the sanctuary cities and the illegal aliens,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said when announcing the suit, dangling the fact that the charges hadn’t been officially dropped yet as a reminder of what could lie in store for him.

And on Thursday, multiple federal prosecutors, including acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned after refusing to follow orders to drop the charges against Adams. In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon described a meeting attended by Bove, Adams’ lawyer and members of her office:

Adams’ lawyer disputes Sassoon’s claims and the case remains on hold. But even should the case be dropped, polling shows that his odds of winning the Democratic primary this year are slim. The New York Times did report on Wednesday that Adams has been in discussion with a local GOP official about potentially running as a Republican in the fall, though Adams denied this in a written statement to the Times, saying he plans to run as a Democrat. Should the charges end up being dropped, Adams will unquestionably be far more indebted to Trump than he ever was to his overseas benefactors.

Suggesting that (allegedly) bribing the mayor of the country’s largest city is totally fine is just the most obvious sign of a growing climate of impunity under Trump. On Monday, the president signed an executive order that suspends a key anti-bribery law — the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — which prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing foreign officials during the course of doing business.

The order argues that American national security depends on companies “gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.” It also framed investigations into potential bribery as prosecutors being overly judgmental of “routine business practices in other nations.” And like most of Trump’s most legally or ethically dubious actions so far, the order further claims that the FCPA’s enforcement “impedes the United States’ foreign policy objectives and therefore implicates the President’s Article II authority over foreign affairs.”

At the most abstract level, claiming that American businesses can only get ahead by greasing the palms of foreign oligarchs or politicians is a terribly damning worldview. The law also just so happens to have affected billionaire Elon Musk’s businesses. As CNBC noted, the reference to “critical minerals” could be seen as a nod to the rare earth minerals that Tesla depends on; under the FCPA, several of Tesla’s suppliers have been hit with civil suits prompting settlements totaling more than $1.5 billion. (When CNBC asked whether Musk had a role in pushing for the order or its language, the White House declined to comment.)

Furthermore, some of the first memos Bondi signed after her confirmation as attorney general included orders to end the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and scale back the enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Bondi has also moved to transfer resources away from corruption-focused offices toward immigration enforcement instead.

This isn’t to imply that there is now free rein for foreign agents to run around Washington (or New York City) handing out large bags of cash with cartoon dollar signs on the side. But the welcome light is on for industrious nation-states and pliable politicians. We’ve already seen former Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., offer up the same kind of claims of political targeting as Adams. While the mayor’s case may now never go to trial, Menendez’s Trumpian rhetoric has signaled an interest in his corruption conviction and sentence being erased. The question of whether corruption is tolerable in the U.S. is no longer whether it is legal, but whether it is of the sort that the president himself can stand to gain.