Bondi's Dismantling of the Kleptocracy Team Threatens National Security [View all]

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/bondi-s-dismantling-of-the-kleptocracy-team-threatens-national-security

Buried near the bottom of the fourth page of a Department of Justice memorandum directed at “Total Elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations”—one of 14 memoranda issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi in the opening hours of her tenure—was this sentence: “Task Force KleptoCapture, the Department’s Kleptocracy Team, and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, shall be disbanded.” The memo continues, “Attorneys assigned to those initiatives shall return to their prior posts, and resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels and TCOs [transnational criminal organizations].” Understanding what the Kleptocracy Team was, how it functioned, and its key achievements are crucial to assessing the wisdom of Attorney General Bondi’s day-one decision to disband it.

Changes announced elsewhere in the memorandum, such as the refocusing of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement on “bribery that facilitates the criminal operations of Cartels and TCOs,” followed by the subsequent “pause” on FCPA enforcement, have received significant and deserved attention. But the disbanding of the Kleptocracy Team and Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative should not escape public notice. With that single sentence, Bondi dismantled an expert prosecutorial team that, for well over a decade, has played a unique role in the Justice Department, focused on ensuring that the U.S. financial system was not used to launder the proceeds of corruption.

The Kleptocracy Team has targeted grand corruption of a breathtaking scope, with several cases involving hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars, stolen from countries where many citizens live in poverty—schemes not involving “Cartels and TCOs,” and which would likely go unprosecuted under President Trump’s Justice Department. Disbanding the team and scattering its members risks losing the institutional knowledge and international relationships that are the team’s unique strength. That capacity cannot be easily reconstituted, meaning that disbanding the team seems likely to cause long-term damage to the government’s capacity to prosecute such crimes.

Shuttering a unit that has unique expertise and that prosecutes conduct universally condemned as odious (kleptocracy, derived from the Greek word for “rule of thieves”) is not worth the marginal benefit of redeploying a small number of prosecutors to focus on “Cartels and TCOs,” particularly a team that has little experience building cases against such targets. Nor does ending the Kleptocracy Initiative advance an “America First” ideology: The laundering of corruption proceeds through the U.S. economy creates security risks and market-distorting forces.

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