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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » Opinion | The Trump Taxes Story Exposes a Glaring Hole in Bidens Criminal Justice Platform – POLITICO

As all of this has been happening, there has also been a remarkable collapse in the Justice Departments pursuit of white-collar crime. According to data maintained by Syracuse University that spans more than 30 years, the Justice Departments number of white-collar prosecutions has repeatedly hit all-time lows during Trumps tenure. To be sure, these problems did not all start under Trumps watchas law professor Jennifer Taub explains in her new book Big Dirty Moneybut they have gotten markedly worse.

The divergent trendsincreasing financial crime, decreasing enforcementshould already have been a national scandal. The sheer scale of the many other forms of corruption and ineptitude throughout this administration, however, seem to have prevented it from breaking through, particularly in light of the ongoing pandemic. Now is an opportune time for the Biden campaign to make the case to the public for a concerted crackdown on financial crimeto explain that the federal government desperately needs a prompt, wholesale and aggressive effort to improve the effectiveness of its law enforcement apparatus in this area, if there is any hope for change.

There are many reasons for the current state of affairs, even beyond Trumps personal interests. One of them is that neither Attorney General William Barr nor former Attorney General Jeff Sessions seemed to have had much interest in pursuing financial crime. Barr has been more interested in expanding executive power and promoting Trumps political and personal priorities. Sessions used the job to advance his interest in making life as difficult as possible for undocumented immigrants. There has also been a series of internal policy changes that have led to greater leniency in corporate criminal investigationsincluding the reversal of a policy created by former Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates that required prosecutors to pursue individuals who committed criminal misconduct at corporations instead of merely entering into big-dollar settlements with the companies and moving on.

Meanwhile, there has been a noticeable deficit of high-level prosecutorial talent in the department, owing at least in part to the fact (widely known in legal circles) that many prominent conservative lawyers did not want to work in the Trump Justice Departmentdue to distaste for the man and his policies, concerns over the long-term financial impact of going back to the private sector after working for the most divisive president in decades, or both. A surprising number of senior Justice Department officials overseeing wide swathes of the countrys criminal law enforcement work have never even been prosecutors. As a result, the Trump-era political appointees and career officials who manage the departments work in this area have overseen a surprisingly long list of high-profile losses and setbacks in the last few years.

Covid-19 appears to have made matters worse. There has been a wave of consumer financial fraud that has grown out of the pandemic that the Justice Department has done virtually nothing to address and that has resulted in more than 200,000 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, totaling more than $150 million in losses. But because financial fraud is significantly underreported (many people are ashamed to admit that they have been victimized), the real numbers are likely at least several multiples of these figures. The department has also done little to pursue an international fraud on state unemployment agencies using stolen personal information from Americans, which has cost states at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

The issue has gotten virtually no attention during the general election campaign, but it was one of the many policy areas that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren raised during the Democratic presidential primaries. Among other things, she campaigned on a law that she had proposed that would have allowed the government to criminally prosecute corporate executives who had negligently overseen companies where criminal conduct had occurred. That particular proposal had its detractors, but it represented much-needed fresh thinking in the area and started a discussion about the limits of white-collar criminal enforcement that had been dormant for too long.

After Warren and others dropped out of the race, however, that issue fell by the wayside. Biden has instead pursued a campaign strategy structured around pledges to reunite the country, level the economic playing field and contain the pandemic. For better or worse politically, Bidens campaign has let events dictate its priorities rather than try to direct the countrys focus. In so doing, Bidens criminal justice plan has been focused on addressing the pervasive racial inequities in the systemwhich have rightly come under scrutiny again in recent months as a result of police violence and widespread protestsas well as other key progressive priorities, like reducing mass incarceration. But one effect of this gap in Bidens public platform is that it has left his campaign at least partially flat-footed dealing with the stories on Trumps taxes in the New York Times. If Bidens campaign had had a concrete and comprehensive proposal to address white-collar crime and financial crime, this could have been a major opportunity for it to tie the news to specific policy ideas. It didnt.

Voters interested in this topic actually have some reason to be skeptical of the attention that this problem might receive in a Biden presidency, since the Justice Department during Barack Obamas presidency drew a significant amount of criticism over its failure to pursue fraudsters and corporate misconduct after the last financial crisis. Which is why taking a more outspoken stand makes all the more sense for Joe Biden. There is even good reason to believeas a strictly political matterthat doing so could draw the support of people from both the tough-on-crime right and the political left. It is an issue not nearly as ideologically polarizing as the race and policing questions that have dominated the campaign.

What should Biden do? He could start by proposing to initiate a uniform federal effort to collect data on the national prevalence of financial crime, which, unlike for other crimes, does not yet exist. Ensuring the right people are in positions of power in the Justice Department would obviously be important too, but the administration under Biden could also issue a directive to local U.S. Attorneys offices throughout the country to make this a key priority for enforcement, much like the Trump administration did with immigration.

The Biden campaign could pledge that, if elected, his Justice Department would at least revisitand strongly consider reversingthe changes to department policy under the Trump administration that have made the enforcement of financial criminal laws more lax, like giving leniency to corporations that self-report the misconduct of their employees. Biden could take a law-and-order approach, promising that his administration would seek a dramatic increase in funding for law enforcement agencies so that they can increase their capabilities, including by hiring more financial analysts, economists and prosecutors. He could promise to make a concerted effort to improve coordination between regulatory agencies and the Justice Departmentparticularly consumer protection agencies like the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureauso that serious cases that lead to civil penalties receive appropriate attention as potential criminal matters too. For a candidate dogged by questions of how he would be able to pay for his proposed climate and health care programs, Biden could pledge to dramatically ramp up the IRS audit and enforcement capabilities, so that the government actually brings in more of the money its owed. And he could argue that the prosecution of criminal tax fraud would be a top priority.

As for Trump, in a properly functioning Justice Department, his tax avoidance, global financial entanglements, and unusual business and campaign transactions already would have attracted the attention of prosecutors. In fairness to the president, it is too soon to conclude that he has committed any crimes. That said, there would be more than enough reason for a very fulsome investigation if this were anyone but the president. But even setting Trump aside, one thing is clear: This country has been in the midst of an epidemic of financial crime that has been getting worse by the day. Now is the time for the Biden campaign to make this the prominent issue for voters that it canand shouldbe.

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Opinion | The Trump Taxes Story Exposes a Glaring Hole in Bidens Criminal Justice Platform - POLITICO

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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » Opinion | The Trump Taxes Story Exposes a Glaring Hole in Bidens Criminal Justice Platform – POLITICO