Catherine Rampell reports that the United States is currently on track for 2018 to have the fewest prosecutions of white-collar and public corruption crimes on record (since 1986).
Down from several years in the mid-1990s with more than 10,000 federal prosecutions of white-collar crime, 2017 and likely 2018 will have fewer than 6,000. Official corruption prosecutions follow a similar trend, and prosecutions referred by the IRS are down from more than 2,500 in the early 1990s, to a projected figure below 1,000 this year.
Rampell notes that these declines began before the current administration, but have gone further due to the increased focus on immigration-relation prosecutions instead.
