When Donald Trump took office eight months ago, the Department of Justice had 36 experienced attorneys assigned full-time to investigate corrupt politicians and police officers.
Today it has two.
All the other lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section have either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation, according to several sources who spoke with NOTUS. The section has also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.
“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, a prosecutor who left the Justice Department this month. “I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”
Sources with knowledge of the section’s operations say the reduction in staff means it can no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country on how to build cases against crooked government officials — let alone prosecute new cases on its own.
To protect against politically motivated abuses, the DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required prosecutors in local U.S. attorneys’ offices to consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.”
But Trump’s DOJ reversed that policy in June. “Department leadership is currently revising this section,” this part of the Justice Manual now says. “The consultation requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”
Several former Justice Department employees expressed extreme concern that the change in the Justice Manual, coupled with the flattening of the Public Integrity Section, opens the door for the Trump administration to engage in partisan prosecutions of Democrats by assigning the job to prosecutors working for U.S. attorneys — political appointees nominated by the president.
While the unit continues to pursue the cases it already had before Trump took office, seven sources told NOTUS that it’s able to do so only because former members of the team who’ve been “detailed” to other DOJ offices are pulling double duty by working these cases on their own accord. An internal DOJ roster obtained by NOTUS shows the Public Integrity Section having 12 lawyers — even though 10 of them have been moved elsewhere. The Public Integrity Section is now smaller than it’s ever been since its creation in 1976. Even in its 1982 report to Congress, the team touted what it called a “modest” team of 25 attorneys.
The department would not provide any answers to NOTUS’ questions about the cutbacks, instead offering a statement that said, “The Department of Justice takes public corruption seriously and continues to investigate and prosecute these cases rigorously.” The White House did not respond to specific questions about its role in the section’s shrinkage. Instead, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said “the Trump Administration is restoring integrity and trust in our institutions. The Trump Administration is holding everyone who commits a crime accountable and bring [sic] back Law and Order!”
The Trump White House has had direct conflict with the Public Integrity Section — including one alarming episode revealed over the weekend by MSNBC, which reported the unit was working on an investigation into Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, and that investigation was shut down by Trump’s DOJ this year A source familiar with the matter confirmed to NOTUS that Homan was under investigation for a 2024 sting operation in which he accepted a $50,000 bribe after promising to steer contracts upon joining the Trump White House. (FBI director Kash Patel said there was “no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing,” per MSNBC).
The DOJ’s Justice Manual still requires local prosecutors to check in with the Public Integrity Section before indicting a political candidate in an effort to avoid meddling with an election too close to voting day, the so-called “60-day rule.” And “consultation with the Public Integrity Section” is still required in all investigations involving a member of Congress or congressional staff member.
But with so few lawyers left to consult, former members of the team say those consultation requirements are essentially meaningless.
“In a stripped-down office, the consulting function becomes nominal, if it exists at all. It sort of exists on paper so the government can say it exists and claim to be complying with the law,” said Michael Romano, a former prosecutor on the team. “But if you want people to provide legitimate oversight, guidance and expertise, you can’t do that with a team of two. In reality, the advising function becomes a box-checking exercise.”
And that guidance isn’t simply bureaucratic red tape — or at least it wasn’t. Sources who spoke with NOTUS pointed to more than a dozen specific instances of investigations where Public Integrity Section attorneys actually rejected criminal cases — involving both Republican and Democratic politicians — or advised severely narrowing the types of criminal charges. And for cases that did move forward, Public Integrity Section prosecutors routinely fielded questions from local federal prosecutors who needed help starting an investigation, or even late Friday evening phone calls with desperate pleas to draft opening statements for a trial that starts on a Monday morning.
“All that consulting is just gone. We’re talking about daily calls about Justice Manual consults or, ‘Can you help me with jury instructions?’ Often it was 7 o’clock on your way out the door, and it was, ‘A judge wants an answer tomorrow. Can you help me?’” said one former DOJ employee.
Gary Restaino, formerly the Biden administration’s appointed U.S. attorney of Arizona, told NOTUS he spent a year and a half on the public integrity team and saw firsthand how important it was to local offices like the one he later led.
“In Arizona they weren’t on all of our cases. Some we would handle on our own. But on a big case, it’s really helpful to have them on. They have connections with agency partners, which makes things happen. And there’s a consistency factor that helps guide investigations that would be done in other districts, so Arizona doesn’t go on its own,” he said.
The virtual elimination of the public integrity team is part of the Trump administration’s broader rollback of Nixon-era reforms aimed at cracking down on corruption and abuse of power. The administration has torn down the communication wall between the Justice Department and the White House, and it has effectively shut down the Merit Systems Protection Board used by employees to challenge their firings.
The reductions at the Public Integrity Section are also consistent with Trump’s sharply defined shift in law-enforcement priorities, which puts an emphasis on arresting immigrants and draws attention away from tackling graft.The day after she was confirmed as attorney general, Pam Bondi disbanded the DOJ task force that cracks down on unregistered foreign agents who engage in political activities here. Days later, the White House issued an executive order “pausing” the long-held practice of investigating Americans who make bribes abroad to score favorable business deals. As The New York Times reported in May, the DOJ also shut down the FBI’s elite public corruption squad. At around that same time, according to one source, department leadership discreetly told the FBI to stop reaching out to the Public Integrity Section.
The section’s demise came in phases. The first to go was the section’s chief, Corey Amundson, who quit in January after he was reassigned to the Trump administration’s new “Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group” targeting Democratic regions that refused to take part in a crackdown on illegal immigration, according to Reuters.
The second phase came as the Trump administration moved to dismiss the federal corruption prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams of New York. The remaining leaders in the Public Integrity Section refused to sign off on dropping the charges. The acting chief, John Keller, quit along with his three deputies, according to several sources who confirmed previous reporting on the matter. Two sources recalled that then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, once Trump’s personal defense lawyer and now a federal appellate judge, gave the public integrity team an ultimatum: sign off on the Adams case dismissal “or you’re all fired.” One source recalled that Bove indicated the prosecutor willing to play along would be crowned the next leader of the team.
In the end, a senior prosecutor on the team, Ed Sullivan, signed the court paperwork formally asking a judge to dismiss all criminal charges against Adams. Sullivan was promoted to the role of acting chief of the Public Integrity Section, a position he continues to hold, according to recent paperwork. Sullivan did not respond to an email requesting comment. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Bove denied that he threatened Public Integrity Section lawyers or offered a reward to whomever would be willing to sign the Adams dismissal paperwork, and he claimed he didn’t know that Sullivan had been promoted.
In the third phase, DOJ leadership shipped out most of the remaining Public Integrity attorneys to regional offices across the country. Some now work on local matters in places like Virginia or South Florida. Others tackle appellate work. One prosecutor, whose previous work at the Public Integrity Section included prosecuting a Wisconsin jail repairman who smuggled drugs and phones to inmates, is now working with the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section indicting a Guatemalan man accused of faking documents to take in an undocumented immigrant teenager.
Several veteran public integrity prosecutors who saw the writing on the wall decided to quit instead, heading into private practice and landing jobs teaching at law schools.
Sullivan now oversees the unit’s only remaining prosecutor, Alexandre Mikhail Dempsey. Federal court records show that neither is listed on any new criminal case filed since the start of the Trump administration, which sources say is indicative of the significant reduction in the team’s resources.
The Public Integrity Section has still landed some recent triumphs, albeit based largely on the team’s work during the Biden administration. Just this week, its work led to the highest-ranking naval officer ever convicted, Admiral Robert P. Burke, receiving a six-year sentence for bribery. However, several former DOJ employees pointed out that the press release announcing the sentencing didn’t even mention the Public Integrity Section. Instead, it listed three former Public Integrity Section lawyers by name — disguising the fact that one is a former team member, another has been detailed to antitrust cases and a third left the DOJ.
To some former DOJ employees, the cutbacks and refusal to acknowledge the team’s work reeks of a personal vendetta from the Trump White House. Some noted how former special counsel Jack Smith, who worked on both the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and Jan. 6 cases against Trump, previously served as the unit’s chief.
Still, others expressed concern over what they perceive as the White House’s meddling in the section’s ongoing investigations, pointing to a three-year corruption case against former Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced of Puerto Rico for taking a bribe to do regulatory favors for a bank that suddenly collapsed this summer — notably after her lawyer, former Trump defense lawyer Chris Kise, met with top DOJ officials in May. It caused a federal judge to call out what she described as “the government’s decision to shift gears at the eleventh hour,” and even led prosecutors to later assert that they had a strong felony case but were deciding to opt for a misdemeanor plea anyway.