The One-Sentence Version
Since January 2025, the Justice Department has indicted or opened criminal investigations into a series of people the president has publicly named as adversaries, including a former FBI director, a former national security adviser, a state attorney general, two Federal Reserve officials, and a sitting U.S. senator.[10] Over the same period, the department declined a record number of fraud and corruption cases[1] and cut the unit that prosecutes public corruption from 36 full-time lawyers to two.[2]
What You Need to Know First
The Justice Department is not an independent agency. It sits inside the executive branch, which means the attorney general answers to the president. On paper, the president is the country’s chief law enforcement officer, and the people who bring federal criminal cases ultimately work for him.
That structure has an obvious danger built into it. If a president can direct prosecutions, he can prosecute his critics and protect his friends. The country learned what that looks like during Watergate, when President Nixon tried to use federal agencies, including the IRS, against people on his enemies list.
The response to Watergate was a set of guardrails meant to put distance between the president’s personal interests and the machinery of prosecution. Two of those guardrails matter for understanding what is happening now.
First, the rules limiting political interference. After Watergate, both parties observed a written policy sharply restricting contact between the White House and the Justice Department about specific criminal cases. The idea was simple: the president sets broad priorities, like focusing on drug trafficking or immigration, but does not pick up the phone and tell prosecutors to charge a particular person. In one area, Congress went further than a policy and wrote an actual criminal law. Under 26 U.S.C. § 7217, it is a federal crime for the president, the vice president, or their staff to ask the IRS to audit or investigate a specific taxpayer.[5] Congress passed that law in 1998, with near-unanimous votes in both chambers, specifically because of what Nixon had tried to do.[6] There is no identical criminal statute covering DOJ prosecutions, but the principle behind it, that a president should not aim law enforcement at named individuals, runs through the post-Watergate reforms.
Second, the Public Integrity Section. The Justice Department created this unit in March 1976, directly in response to Watergate.[3][4] Its job is to prosecute corruption by public officials of both parties, and it holds exclusive authority over criminal cases against federal judges. The point of housing these cases in one specialized unit was to keep them at arm’s length from whoever happened to be in power.
A few terms will come up repeatedly:
- An indictment is a formal criminal charge. In federal cases, charges generally have to be approved by a grand jury, a panel of ordinary citizens who review the prosecutor’s evidence in secret and decide whether there is enough to proceed. Grand juries almost always approve charges, which is why it is notable when one refuses.
- A declination is a decision not to prosecute a case that investigators referred for charges.
- An interim U.S. attorney is a temporary top federal prosecutor for a region, installed by the administration without Senate confirmation. By law, an interim appointment is limited to 120 days unless the Senate confirms the person.
- A statute of limitations is the legal deadline for filing charges. Once it passes, the case can no longer be brought.
Keep those in mind, because the same patterns show up across nearly every case below.
What Actually Happened
Two things happened at the same time, and they are easier to understand together than apart. The department turned its attention outward, toward people the president had identified, while turning away from the corporate fraud and public corruption that had long been its core work.
The hinge: the Eric Adams case
The shift became visible in February 2025, with a case that had nothing to do with Trump’s critics. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, had been indicted on federal corruption charges in 2024. In early 2025, the new leadership of the Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the case.
The order came from Emil Bove, then the second-ranking official at the department. His memo did not argue that Adams was innocent. It said the case should be dismissed in part because it interfered with Adams’s ability to help the administration with immigration enforcement.[7]
The prosecutors handling the case refused. Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, resigned rather than file the dismissal. She wrote that dropping the charges while leaving open the option to refile them later created an obvious problem: it implicitly threatened to revive the prosecution if Adams’s cooperation on immigration ever fell short.[7] John Keller, the acting head of the Public Integrity Section, also refused and resigned, along with several colleagues. Hagan Scotten, the lead line prosecutor, wrote in his resignation letter that he expected the department would eventually find someone “enough of a fool, or enough of a coward” to file the motion.[8]
The blowback over Adams marked the beginning of the Public Integrity Section’s decline. Over the following year, the unit that prosecutes corruption was cut from roughly 40 staff to two full-time attorneys, and its open caseload fell from around 175 to 200 matters down to about 20.[2][9]
The president names his targets
In September 2025, the outward-facing half of the story moved into the open, in the president’s own words.
On September 20, Trump published a post on Truth Social addressed to “Pam,” his attorney general, Pam Bondi. The post expressed frustration that “nothing is being done” about his adversaries and that the department could not “delay any longer.” It named James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff.[10] According to a person familiar with the matter, Trump had intended the message to be private and was surprised to learn he had posted it publicly.[11] He later deleted it.[12]
The timing connected directly to what came next. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, had declined to bring charges against Letitia James. Trump publicly criticized him, and Siebert left the office. In his place the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, a former member of Trump’s personal legal defense team who had no prior experience as a prosecutor.[13] Within days, she began presenting cases to grand juries.
The indicted: Comey, James, Bolton
James Comey. The former FBI director, whom Trump fired in 2017 and has attacked for years, was indicted on September 25, 2025, on two counts: making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding.[14] The charges related to testimony about authorizing news leaks. The timing was tight. The five-year statute of limitations was set to expire on September 30, and Halligan secured the indictment days before the deadline, five days after the president’s post.[13]
The case did not last. On November 24, 2025, Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie dismissed it, ruling that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed and therefore lacked the authority to bring the charges.[15] The Justice Department appealed to the Fourth Circuit in February 2026.[16]
Letitia James. The New York attorney general, who had won a civil fraud judgment against Trump and his company, was indicted on October 9, 2025, on charges of bank fraud and making false statements, related to a mortgage application.[15] Her case was dismissed in the same November 24 ruling that ended Comey’s, for the same reason.
What happened afterward is unusual. The department tried to bring the James case back. Twice, grand juries refused. A grand jury in Norfolk declined to indict her on December 4, and a second grand jury in Alexandria declined on December 11.[17] Grand juries approve the overwhelming majority of charges prosecutors put in front of them. Two refusals on the same case is the kind of thing that almost never happens.
John Bolton. Trump’s former national security adviser, who wrote a book sharply critical of him, was indicted on October 16, 2025, on 18 counts related to the handling of classified information, including transmitting and retaining national defense documents.[18] Bolton pleaded not guilty. His attorneys said the documents were reviewed and the matter resolved years ago, and that the materials investigators found were no longer classified.[19]
That case has since resolved, and it did not resolve the way the others did. On June 26, 2026, Bolton pleaded guilty before Judge Theodore Chuang to one count of illegal retention of national defense information. He agreed to forfeit roughly $2.2 million, with the government capped at recommending 60 months. Sentencing is set for October 28, 2026.[40]
This is worth stating plainly rather than moving past. Bolton’s was prosecuted separately, in Maryland rather than the Eastern District of Virginia, and it was never touched by the ruling that dismissed the Comey and James cases. A guilty plea is not a jury verdict, and defendants plead for many reasons, including the cost and risk of trial. But an earlier version of this article told readers to withhold judgment on this case until the evidence was tested, and the fair thing to do now is report where that landed: of the three, the one that looked most substantive on its face is the one that produced a conviction.
That does not resolve the question the rest of this article is about. Whether a case is meritorious and whether it was selected for political reasons are separate questions, and a prosecution can be both well-founded and chosen because of who the defendant is. Readers can weigh that for themselves.
One comparison belongs alongside it. Trump himself was charged in 2023 with retaining classified documents after leaving office, a case dismissed in 2024 on the grounds that the special counsel who brought it had been improperly appointed. The same administration then carried a classified-documents prosecution against one of the president’s prominent critics to a conviction.
The investigated: Brennan, Schiff, Cook, Powell
Beyond the indictments, the department opened criminal investigations into several other figures the president has clashed with.
- John Brennan, the former CIA director, was told by his lawyers that he is a target of a grand jury investigation in Florida tied to the government’s 2016 assessment of Russian election interference.[20]
- Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California and a longtime Trump antagonist, became the subject of a mortgage-fraud inquiry. Reporting indicates investigators have struggled to build a viable case, in part because the documents in question are well past the statute of limitations.[21] Schiff’s attorney has called the allegations “transparently false, stale, and long debunked.”[21]
- Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, was placed under criminal investigation that remained open as of May 2026.[22]
- Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, whom Trump repeatedly pressured to cut interest rates, was the subject of a criminal investigation that the department dropped in April 2026.[22]
The Powell case points to something the indictments also showed: many of these matters did not hold up. They were opened, publicized, and then quietly closed or thrown out. The legal exposure for the target may end. The message to others does not.
Not only politicians
If the list stopped at elected officials and former officials, it could be read as ordinary, if aggressive, partisan combat. It does not stop there.
E. Jean Carroll. In May 2026, news broke that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation touching the writer E. Jean Carroll, the private citizen who won a civil verdict against Trump after a jury found he had sexually assaulted and defamed her.[23] The theory involves alleged perjury: in a 2022 deposition, Carroll said no one else was paying her legal fees, and it later emerged that a nonprofit funded by the billionaire Reid Hoffman had covered some costs. Reporting indicates the inquiry is focused more on Hoffman’s nonprofit than on Carroll herself.[24] A federal appeals court had already found no evidence that Carroll was personally involved in securing the funding or knew where it came from before her deposition.[24] She is 82 years old.
The Southern Poverty Law Center. In April 2026, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC, a civil-rights organization that has frequently criticized Trump and his allies, on 11 counts including wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.[25] The Justice Department alleges that between 2014 and 2023 the group secretly routed more than $3 million to individuals connected to extremist organizations, using fictitious entities to disguise the payments.[25][26] The SPLC has said it is “outraged by the false allegations” and pointed to 55 years of work against white supremacy.[27]
The SPLC case is genuinely complicated, and it deserves to be treated that way. The allegations are specific and serious, and they are unproven. A reader who supports the administration will see a legitimate fraud case; a reader who opposes it will see an organization on the president’s enemies list being prosecuted. Both should watch how the evidence holds up in court before deciding. What can be said now is that the indictment is one more in a sequence of criminal actions against Trump’s named critics.
Six members of Congress. In November 2025, six Democratic lawmakers, all of whom had served in the military or intelligence community, released a 90-second video telling service members they “can” and “must” refuse illegal orders.[28] Trump responded on Truth Social by accusing them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.”[28][36] The Justice Department, through the U.S. attorney in Washington, sought to indict them. In February 2026, a grand jury declined.[29] Senator Elissa Slotkin, one of the six, said afterward that “a grand jury of anonymous American citizens upheld the rule of law.”[29]
There is also a separate cluster of arrests involving Democratic officials who clashed physically with immigration agents during oversight visits, including a senator briefly removed from a press conference, two mayors, and a member of Congress.[30] Several of those cases were dropped or downgraded. They belong to a related but distinct pattern, and a tracker maintained by the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy catalogs the full set.[30]
Local election officials. In May 2026, the FBI sent agents to the homes of current and former election officials in Wisconsin as part of a multi-state effort to revisit the 2020 presidential result. Agents had interviewed the state’s deputy election director, then appeared unannounced at the home of Milwaukee County’s elections director rather than contacting her office.[37] They asked about two claims that have been discredited for years: a flash drive of altered absentee results, and a story about a man from Illinois printing ballots for Biden in a back room.[37] Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said it was “unfortunate that the FBI chose to visit the private residence” of his elections director instead of the commission’s office.[38] The visits followed similar FBI activity in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. No court or audit has found fraud that changed Wisconsin’s 2020 result.
One name often raised in this context is former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who led the House investigation into January 6. A fellow Republican referred her to the Justice Department in late 2024, alleging witness tampering. As of this writing, the department has not announced a criminal investigation, so her situation remains a referral rather than a case.[31]
A Timeline
- 2024: Mayor Eric Adams (D) is indicted on federal corruption charges.[7]
- February 2025: DOJ leadership orders the Adams case dropped. Danielle Sassoon, John Keller, Hagan Scotten, and others resign rather than comply.[7][8]
- Spring 2025: The Public Integrity Section begins shrinking; cases are handed off to U.S. attorney offices.[9]
- September 20, 2025: Trump posts publicly, addressing AG Bondi, urging prosecution of Comey, James, and Schiff.[10]
- September 2025: U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert leaves after declining to charge James; Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer, is installed.[13]
- September 25, 2025: James Comey is indicted, days before the statute of limitations expires.[14]
- October 9, 2025: Letitia James is indicted on mortgage-related fraud charges.[15]
- October 16, 2025: John Bolton is indicted on classified-documents charges.[18]
- November 2025: Six veteran lawmakers release the “illegal orders” video; Trump calls it seditious.[28]
- November 24, 2025: A federal judge dismisses the Comey and James cases, finding Halligan unlawfully appointed.[15]
- December 4 and 11, 2025: Two grand juries decline to re-indict Letitia James.[17]
- February 2026: A grand jury declines to indict the six lawmakers; DOJ appeals the Comey and James dismissals.[16][29]
- April 2026: The SPLC is indicted; the Powell investigation is dropped.[22][25]
- May 2026: A criminal investigation involving E. Jean Carroll is reported; the Public Integrity Section is down to two attorneys.[2][23]
- May 2026: The FBI revisits the 2020 election in several swing states, sending agents to the homes of Wisconsin election officials.[37]
- March 2026: The DOJ settles its antitrust case against Live Nation a week into trial and withdraws its claims; more than 30 states refuse to join and keep litigating.[43]
- June 26, 2026: John Bolton pleads guilty to one count of illegal retention of national defense information; sentencing is set for October 28.[40]
- August 8-10, 2026: Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense lawyer, is confirmed attorney general by the narrowest of margins and sworn in. That evening the Office of Legal Counsel publishes an opinion extending executive privilege to the president’s private advisers.[41][42]
- August 2026: A second jury deadlocks in the MS-13 racketeering case the administration promoted in 2025; Judge Lamberth declares another mistrial.[44]
A New Attorney General, and His First Evening
The department changed hands in August 2026, and the sequence is short enough to state precisely.
Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense lawyer, was confirmed as attorney general on August 8 by the narrowest of margins after a bruising fight. He was sworn in on Monday, August 10, with the oath administered by Emil Bove, another former Trump attorney who now sits as a federal appeals judge.[41]
That evening, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel published an opinion extending executive privilege to the president’s “private advisers.” The opinion, written by OLC head Elliot Gaiser, holds that privilege can cover communications with private individuals so long as they “relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential.”[42]
Two things make it notable. It is the first time the department has explicitly extended executive privilege to people outside the White House, including private citizens, and it expands a protection the Supreme Court has recognized only in narrower terms. Its practical effect is to make congressional investigations harder, which is a shield that matters most if the House changes hands in November.[42]
Reporting identifies Sens. Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis among the Republicans who voted to confirm Blanche after receiving his assurances about limits on presidential immunity and the department’s independence.[41] Whether an OLC opinion published hours into his tenure is consistent with those assurances is a judgment readers can make. The opinion may also not survive: it is likely to be challenged, and courts are not obliged to accept the broadened definition.
The Other Half: What the Department Stopped Doing
The cases above are only part of the picture, and arguably the smaller part. The more sweeping change is in what the Justice Department chose not to prosecute.
A common assumption is that the department is simply prosecuting fewer people. That is not quite right, and the precise version matters. Total federal prosecutions did not collapse. They were redirected. In the first six months of the second term, immigration prosecutions surged to roughly 32,000, nearly triple the rate under the Biden administration.[1] The department did not stop bringing cases. It changed which cases it brings.
What fell, sharply, was enforcement against the kinds of crime that tend to involve powerful people and institutions.
According to a ProPublica analysis of two decades of Justice Department data, the department declined more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of 2025. In February alone, it declined nearly 11,000, the most in any single month since at least 2004. The previous high was about 6,500 in September 2019, during Trump’s own first term.[1] Several categories of traditional crime saw fewer prosecutions than under any new administration since at least 2009.[1]
White-collar enforcement reached record lows. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University projected about 3,862 white-collar prosecutions for fiscal year 2025, down from a peak of nearly 11,000 in the mid-1990s. The share of white-collar referrals that prosecutors actually pursued fell to 24 percent, a record low, meaning roughly three of every four fraud referrals went nowhere. By comparison, immigration cases were prosecuted at over 90 percent.[32] Analysts across the political spectrum, including the center-right outlet The Dispatch, documented the retreat on corporate crime.[33]
Public corruption work shrank along with the Public Integrity Section. Foreign-bribery enforcement was paused, and the administration issued pardons to more than a dozen officials who had been charged with or convicted of corruption.[34] A vivid single example came in May 2026, when the department moved to drop its bribery and fraud case against the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who had been accused of a scheme to pay up to $265 million in bribes, after Adani hired the president’s personal lawyer and pledged $10 billion in U.S. investment.[39]
A second example arrived in March 2026, and this one had already reached a jury box. The department’s antitrust trial against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent of Ticketmaster, opened in New York on March 2. About a week in, the department settled and withdrew its claims. Live Nation paid a $280 million fine and agreed to cap service fees at 15 percent at its own venues, divest 13 amphitheaters, and accept eight years of consent-decree oversight. It was not broken up, and it kept Ticketmaster.[43]
More than 30 states refused to sign on and kept litigating without the federal government. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said his state “joined this bipartisan coalition because free markets require real competition.” New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said the settlement “doesn’t adequately fix the harm Live Nation has done to the marketplace.” The trial resumed on March 18 with the states as the remaining plaintiffs.[43]
In August 2026, the outlet The Currency reported that Trump had telephoned a senior Justice Department official shortly before the trial and told them to “settle it.” That account rests on a single unnamed source relaying what an official later told associates, no other outlet has confirmed it, and it should be read as an allegation rather than an established fact. The settlement terms and the states’ refusal are documented independently of it.[43]
This is where the original claim needs care. It is tempting to say the federal indictment rate has fallen to the lowest point in history. The evidence does not support a statement that broad. What it supports is more specific, and still striking: the volume of declined cases in early 2025 was the highest in any month since at least 2004, the year the available data begins; the white-collar referral rate hit a record low in the data series; and foreign-bribery enforcement fell to its lowest level in years. Those are bounded, sourced claims. “The lowest in all of history” is not.
Named former prosecutors described the change from the inside. Barbara McQuade, a U.S. attorney in Michigan for years under a previous administration, called the February directive to decline cases “unusual.” A 28-year narcotics prosecutor, Joseph Gerbasi, said “all of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out.”[1]
What Happens When the Cases Reach a Jury
There is a third measure besides which cases are brought and which are declined: how the cases perform once citizens hear them.
In March 2025 the administration publicly celebrated the extradition from Guatemala of Moises “Viejo Santos” Rivera-Luna, described as an MS-13 leader and charged with racketeering conspiracy. In August 2026, for the second time in five months, a federal jury failed to reach a verdict. Jurors reported deliberating to a “hopeless” impasse, and Judge Royce Lamberth declared a mistrial after 22 witnesses and extensive audio evidence.[44]
The office that brought it, the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia under Jeanine Pirro, recorded a string of mistrials and acquittals over the year that legal observers described as embarrassing for federal prosecutors. Some of those observers suggest juries are scrutinizing the department’s cases more closely than they once did.[44]
A hung jury is not an acquittal, and it establishes nothing about whether a defendant is guilty. What it measures is narrower and still worth recording: the distance between how confidently a prosecution was promoted and how it held up in front of twelve people who heard the evidence.
By the Numbers
| What | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal cases declined, first 6 months of 2025 | 23,000+ | [1] |
| Cases declined in February 2025 (most since at least 2004) | ~11,000 | [1] |
| Immigration prosecutions, first 6 months (nearly 3x Biden rate) | ~32,000 | [1] |
| Projected white-collar prosecutions, FY2025 | 3,862 | [32] |
| White-collar referral prosecution rate (record low) | 24% | [32] |
| Public Integrity Section attorneys (from ~36–40) | 2 | [2][9] |
| Public Integrity open matters (from ~175–200) | ~20 | [9] |
| Corruption-related pardons | 15+ | [34] |
| Grand juries that refused to indict Trump targets (James x2, the six lawmakers) | 3 | [17][29] |
Why It Matters
Put the two halves together. The same department that found the resources to indict a former FBI director days before a deadline, and to seek charges against six members of Congress, was declining record numbers of fraud cases and dismantling the unit that polices corruption regardless of party. That is a statement about priorities.
The corruption pullback has practical consequences. Former officials note that the Public Integrity Section often stepped in to bring cases in smaller states and rural areas, where local U.S. attorney offices lack the resources or expertise to take on complex corruption.[9] With the unit gutted, some of those cases will not be brought by anyone.
The targeting side carries a different kind of cost, and it does not depend on convictions. Most of the marquee cases have failed so far. The indictments of Comey and James were thrown out. Grand juries refused James twice and refused the six lawmakers. The Powell investigation was dropped. But an investigation is itself a punishment. It brings legal bills, public suspicion, and the knowledge that the machinery of federal law enforcement is pointed at you. Other potential critics watch and draw their own conclusions.
This is the reason the post-Watergate guardrails were built, and it is worth stating in terms that do not depend on party. A justice system that can be aimed at a president’s enemies can be aimed at anyone’s enemies. The protections were written by lawmakers of both parties because they understood that a tool this powerful does not stay in one set of hands forever. Whatever one thinks of the specific people on the current list, the precedent outlasts them.
Common Claims and What the Evidence Shows
“These people actually committed crimes. The cases are legitimate.”
Some of the allegations may have merit, and a few should be judged only after a trial. Bolton’s classified-documents case and the SPLC fraud case both rest on specific, detailed claims that have not yet been tested. The honest answer is that the question is not whether every target is innocent. It is whether the department is applying its power evenhandedly. The evidence on that is hard to ignore: prosecutors who declined to charge were removed, an inexperienced loyalist was installed, a federal judge found that appointment unlawful, and three separate grand juries of ordinary citizens refused to indict.[15][17][29] Those are not the markers of routine cases.
“Every administration sets enforcement priorities. Focusing on immigration is a choice voters endorsed.”
That part is fair. Presidents do set priorities, and a focus on immigration enforcement is a legitimate policy choice. The issue is the scale and the pairing. The volume of declined cases in early 2025 was the highest in any month in the available two decades of data, exceeding even the first Trump term.[1] Setting priorities is normal. Declining a record number of fraud and corruption cases while simultaneously pursuing the president’s named critics is the combination that raises the question.
“The Adams case was dropped for legitimate reasons.”
The department did offer a rationale: that the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to assist on immigration. But the prosecutors who quit, including career officials and the line attorney on the case, said in writing that the stated reasoning created an ethical problem, because it tied the dismissal to the mayor’s future cooperation.[7][8] Their objection was not that Adams was guilty. It was that dropping the case this way looked like a trade.
“This is just partisan framing.”
The throughline of this account does not come from one side. A judge dismissed the Comey and James indictments. Grand juries of anonymous citizens refused to indict. Career prosecutors, several appointed under earlier administrations, resigned in protest. Fox News reported on the president’s deleted post pressuring his attorney general,[12] and the center-right Dispatch documented the retreat on white-collar crime.[33] The president stated his aims himself, in public.[10]
Where Things Stand Now
As of late August 2026:
- The department has a new attorney general. Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, was confirmed August 8 and sworn in August 10. The Office of Legal Counsel published its executive-privilege opinion that same evening.[41][42]
- The Comey and James appeals were consolidated by the Fourth Circuit on January 12, 2026, with argument set for September 2026. The dismissals were without prejudice, but the five-year statute of limitations on the Comey charges expired on September 30, 2025, which is why that detail matters more in his case than in hers.[16][45]
- John Bolton pleaded guilty on June 26, 2026 to one count of illegal retention of national defense information, agreeing to forfeit about $2.2 million. Sentencing is set for October 28, 2026.[40]
- A criminal investigation touching E. Jean Carroll and Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit was reported in May.[23][24]
- The SPLC case is proceeding.[25]
- The investigation of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook remained open; the Jerome Powell investigation was dropped.[22]
- The Public Integrity Section is down to two full-time attorneys. Several of the prosecutors forced out have opened a private law firm focused on the corruption work the department stepped back from.[2][35]
- The FBI’s multi-state review of the 2020 election reached Wisconsin, where agents visited election officials’ homes; local officials say they fear an attempt to seize the state’s absentee ballots.[37][38]
- The Live Nation antitrust case ended for the federal government in March 2026 but continues without it, with more than 30 states as plaintiffs.[43]
- The MS-13 racketeering prosecution the administration promoted in 2025 has now deadlocked two juries.[44]
The cases will keep moving. Some may yet produce convictions, and those should be judged on their evidence. But the broader pattern is already on the record, in court rulings, in grand-jury refusals, in two decades of prosecution data, and in the president’s own words.
Sources
1. ProPublica: Trump’s DOJ Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration
3. U.S. Department of Justice: About the Public Integrity Section
4. Washington Examiner: Trump to Close DOJ Corruption Unit Created After Watergate
7. CNBC: DOJ Asks Judge to Dismiss Eric Adams Case After Seven Prosecutors Resign in Protest
8. NBC New York: AUSA Who Worked on Adams Case Resigns in Sharply Worded Letter to DOJ
9. NBC News: Justice Department Office That Prosecutes Public Corruption Slashed in Size
10. Washington Post: Trump Presses Bondi to Prosecute Political Foes Including Schiff, Comey
11. NBC News: Trump Accidentally Posted Message Pressuring Pam Bondi to Charge Enemies
12. Fox News: Trump Deletes Post Demanding Bondi Prosecute Comey, Schiff, James
13. NBC News: Justice Department Charges James Comey Following Pressure From Trump
14. CBS News: Former FBI Director James Comey Indicted on 2 Counts
16. NBC News: Trump Administration Appeals Dismissal of Indictments Against Comey and James
17. CNBC: DOJ Fails Again to Get Grand Jury to Indict New York AG Letitia James
18. CBS News: Former Trump Adviser John Bolton Indicted for Allegedly Mishandling Classified Info
19. PBS NewsHour: What to Know About the Federal Charges Against John Bolton
21. NBC News: DOJ Opens Investigation Into New York AG’s Office and Sen. Adam Schiff
23. CNN: Exclusive: Justice Department Launched E. Jean Carroll Investigation
24. Washington Post: DOJ Probes Reid Hoffman’s Nonprofit, Funding of E. Jean Carroll’s Legal Bills
26. NPR: Southern Poverty Law Center Indicted on Federal Fraud Charges
27. NBC News: Southern Poverty Law Center Says It Was Targeted by the Trump Administration
29. NBC News: Democrats Involved in ‘Illegal Orders’ Video Say They Won’t Cooperate With DOJ Probe
30. Protect Democracy: Retaliatory Action Tracker
31. The Hill: GOP Report Recommends Liz Cheney Be Criminally Investigated Over Jan. 6 Work
33. The Dispatch: Has the Trump Administration Retreated on White-Collar Crime?
34. NPR: How the Trump Administration Has Undermined the Fight Against Public Corruption
35. CBS News: Ousted Justice Dept. Attorneys Who Prosecuted Trump Open New Law Firm Targeting Corruption
36. Roll Call: Dems in ‘Illegal Orders’ Video Defiant After DOJ’s Failed Indictment Attempt
37. The New Republic: FBI Agents Show Up at Homes of Election Workers in Key Swing State
39. Al Jazeera: US drops fraud charges after billionaire Adani pledges $10bn investment (May 18, 2026)
41. PBS NewsHour: Todd Blanche sworn in as attorney general after bruising confirmation battle and Washington Post: Senate narrowly approves Todd Blanche as AG, capping tough confirmation fight (August 8, 2026) and Forbes: Todd Blanche Sworn In, These Key Trump Loyalty Tests Await New Attorney General (August 10, 2026)
42. NOTUS: Trump DOJ says executive privilege covers the president’s private advisers and The Hill: DOJ says executive privilege extends to outside advisers
43. WHYY: What to know about the DOJ settlement with Live Nation and why the trial continues and Variety: Live Nation Reaches Settlement With U.S. Department of Justice in Antitrust Case and Ohio Capital Journal: Feds drop Live Nation/Ticketmaster suit; Ohio and other states keep fighting (April 13, 2026) and The Currency: The Trump intervention that got the DOJ off Live Nation’s back (August 2026)
44. CNN via KVIA: Trump admin celebrated the prosecution of accused MS-13 ringleaders. Then the case fell apart twice (August 24, 2026) and Daily Caller: Trump Admin Celebrated The Prosecution Of Accused MS-13 Ringleader. Then The Case Fell Apart Twice (August 24, 2026)
45. Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse: United States v. Comey, 1:25-cr-00272 (E.D. Va.) case docket and Lawfare: Federal Judge Dismisses Comey and James Indictments