DOJ's Very Convenient Corporate Crackdown

DOJ's Very Convenient Corporate Crackdown
(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Just two weeks before the election, the Justice Department rolled out a series of high-profile white-collar cases and settlements that include an antitrust complaint against Google, a settlement with Purdue Pharma over its marketing of the drug OxyContin, and a global resolution with Goldman Sachs of a long-running bribery investigation. It was enough to prompt Axios breathlessly to declare that this was the “aggressive government crackdown on white-collar crime” that “America has waited a decade for.”

As I have written before, the Trump administration’s Justice Department has presided over two incongruous and dangerous trends—historically high levels of white-collar malfeasance and historically low levels of white-collar prosecutions. They did not start under Trump, but they have gotten sharply and unambiguously worse under his Justice Department. (You don’t have to take my word for it. For those interested in the subject, I highly recommend the recent and timely book Big Dirty Money, by law professor Jennifer Taub.)

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