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One possible lesson of the many brazen, conspicuous scandals related to President Trump and others in his orbit: The U.S. government has been massively underinvesting in enforcement and prosecution of white-collar crime.
Trumpkins argue that the pileup of charges against onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a sign that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gone rogue. After all, many of the allegations against Manafort — laundering $30 million in income, submitting false tax returns, lying to banks, failing to register as a foreign agent, obstructing justice — stem from his work in and for Ukraine before 2016. They’re not directly related to his time on the Trump campaign.
But the right question isn’t why Mueller is going after Manafort now. It is: Why didn’t someone go after Manafort before? After all, there were just So. Many. Red. Flags.
Not just the wire transfers to buy jackets made from exotic animals but also the decades of work for international thugs and kleptocrats, such as former Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos or former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
Manafort is also hardly the only person associated with Trump who has engaged in conspicuously suspicious financial and political activities.
There was the apparent treatment of the Trump Foundation as a personal checkbook, from which Trump used other people’s charitable donations to settle his for-profit businesses’ legal disputes and to purchase gigantic portraits of himself.
Or there’s the fishy stock trades by Trump cronies, including Carl Icahn and even the current commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross. (Both Icahn and Ross have denied engaging in insider trading.)
There’s a clear reason so many Trump-related figures likely felt free to engage in dodgy behavior in broad daylight: They didn’t expect anyone to care. Absent the scrutiny that came with Trump’s political success, such activities probably would have gone ignored.
Federal prosecutions of white-collar crime — a category that includes tax, corporate, health-care or securities fraud, among other crimes — are on track this year to reach their lowest level on record.
We have little reason to believe actual levels of such crimes have decreased. So why has enforcement plummeted?
That’s subject to some debate.
The Trump administration has openly prioritized prosecution of other crimes, particularly those related to immigration. But the downward trend in white-collar and official-corruption prosecutions predates the Trump presidency. The Obama administration, you may recall, was often criticized for failing to hold corporations and executives accountable in the wake of the financial crisis.
Evidence of innocence?
Some argue that big corporations and the wealthy have become too influential. Jesse Eisinger, in an excellent book on the topic, blames a culture of risk aversion in the Justice Department. Eric H. Holder Jr., an attorney general under Obama, once suggested that corporate consolidation left some firms too big to jail.
But undoubtedly part of the issue is resources.
After 9/11, for instance, terrorism investigations became more of a priority, crowding out available dollars and personnel for white-collar investigations.
Astonishingly, this decline in enforcement is being cited as evidence of innocence. Manafort’s lawyer, in his opening statement last week, suggested that his client must not be guilty of tax fraud because he’d never been audited.
Likewise, on Fox News, Trump surrogate and former prosecutor Joseph diGenova objected to Mueller’s prosecution of Manafort in part because Manafort “has no criminal record.”
Which is, you know, a thing that’s true for every defendant, until they get prosecuted.
In any case, contra such objections, Manafort’s prosecution today is less a sign of Mueller’s overreach, and more a sign of the rest of our federal government’s decades of underperformance.
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