Justice Department officials are drafting plans to broadly restructure — and significantly downsize — several key units in Washington responsible for investigating cases of fraud and public corruption, according to three people briefed on the changes.
The plans, which have not been finalized, could be announced within the next few days. If enacted, they would be the latest initiative by the Trump administration aimed at limiting the ability of prosecutors in Washington to bring sensitive and politically fraught cases against business figures and elected officials.
It remains unclear if the department plans to farm out cases to U.S. attorney’s offices around the country, as has been discussed internally; use the shift to drastically cut the number of investigations; or both.
The move, like the forced transfers or firings of career nonpolitical prosecutors in recent weeks, is part of an effort to reduce the power of divisions that Trump appointees claim were politically “weaponized” or otherwise overused under the Biden administration.
Chad Gilmartin, a department spokesman, would not comment on specific plans but said the department’s leadership was “making sure our resources are being utilized in a way that assures the mission to make America safe again is successful.”
The changes being considered would affect prosecutors inside the Justice Department’s public integrity division, along with units that prosecute foreign corruption cases and conduct investigations focused on money laundering and asset recovery, the people said.
The public integrity unit, which focuses on criminal cases against elected officials, has already been particularly hard hit. Several of its prosecutors resigned last month after top officials pushed to drop a bribery case against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams.
One of the few anti-fraud units inside the department’s main office likely to be spared from the changes is a division that focuses on health care cases.
This week, senior Justice Department officials consulted with members of the public integrity team and urged them to find positions in other parts of the department, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange. The unit was once run by Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump.
Department officials signaled that the corruption and fraud units inside headquarters, known as Main Justice, could be reduced from an original complement of two dozen to three dozen prosecutors to as few as 10 each, the people familiar with the changes said.
Just as important, the units could be stripped of their ability to file indictments on their own, diminishing them more or less to an advisory role with no real law enforcement powers, they added.
Officials have long discussed moving fraud and corruption cases from Washington to some of the Justice Department’s 93 U.S. attorney’s offices. That is in keeping with the administration’s overarching belief that federal law enforcement embedded in the states is better suited to investigate corruption and fraud in its own jurisdiction, one of those familiar with the planning effort said.
The move comes at a time of intense turmoil inside the department, which has experienced a flurry of firings, demotions and personnel changes in the past two months. And the restructuring of the units was only the latest effort by the administration to alter the way that fraud and corruption cases are handled.
Last month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order halting all investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries under a law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He argued that pursuing such cases hurt the United States’ competitive edge.
Administration officials have also ordered the shutdown of a Justice Department initiative to seize assets owned by foreign kleptocrats.