The Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, which is tasked with overseeing prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption, is set to be slashed in size, with only around a half-dozen employees remaining.
The decision was reported by NBC News, which quoted three officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They said that only a small fraction of its employees will remain employed, and the unit will no longer directly handle investigations or prosecutions.
According to the Justice Department, leaders are "taking a broad look" at its structure, cautioning no final decisions had been made.
Prosecutors have been reportedly told they will be asked to take new assignments in the department and that as few as five lawyers may remain in the unit. U.S. attorney's offices around the country are expected to take on the cases that the section was prosecuting.
The group was created in 1976 following the Watergate scandal and is tasked with overseeing criminal prosecutions of federal public corruption cases across the country. At the end of the Biden administration there were about 30 prosecutors in the unit.
The section also oversees the department's handling of election crimes like voter fraud and campaign finance offenses. Under the Biden administration it was also home to the election threats task force, launched to combat a growing number of threats of violence against election workers.
David Laufman, a former head of DOJ's counterintelligence section who served in both Republican nd Democratic administrations, questioned the move.
"The only reasonable interpretation of this extraordinary action is that the administration wants to transfer responsibility for public corruption cases from career attorneys at Main Justice to political appointees heading U.S. attorney's offices," Laufman said.
The decision, he added, raises "serious questions about whether future investigations and prosecutions will be motivated by improper partisan considerations."
The Justice Department has already paused enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits companies from bribing foreign governments to win business. Most notably, the Department also moved to drop the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
After federal prosecutors in New York refused to drop the charges, Trump appointees at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington asked members of the Public Integrity Section to do so.
John Keller, the acting head of the section, refused to drop the Adams charges and resigned, two sources said. Three other members of the section also resigned. The next day, Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, held a video meeting with other members of the Public Integrity Section, and urged one of them to sign a filing asking a judge to dismiss the charges against Adams.
Prosecutors noted that DOJ officials were not permanently dropping the charges against Adams. Instead, they were moving to dismiss the indictment "without prejudice," a legal maneuver that would allow federal prosecutors to restore the charges at any time— for instance, if Adams were to stop cooperating with Trump's immigration policies.
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