There's Never Been a Better Time to Be a White-Collar Criminal

[Demovictory9]

https://newrepublic.com/article/158582/theres-never-better-time-white-collar-criminal

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a White-Collar Criminal
Thanks to the Trump administration’s signature mix of incompetence and corruption, America is knee-deep in fraud and corporate malfeasance.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIO WAGNER

In mid-June, a reporter at an Israeli news outlet gave me some startling information about an international criminal investigation that I had led while working as a prosecutor at the Justice Department. Until earlier this year, I had specialized in white-collar crime in an office based in Washington, D.C. My work, along with that of two outstanding FBI agents, had resulted in the conviction last year of an Israeli citizen named Lee Elbaz. Elbaz had directed a massive fraud—a crude but surprisingly effective scheme that resulted in nearly $150 million in losses to victims throughout the world who had been led to believe that they were investing in obscure financial instruments known as binary options.

Elbaz, however, was not the most significant player in this crime ring. That distinction seemed to fall to a man named Yosef Herzog who had also been charged, along with about 20 other people. I had charged Herzog with wire fraud early last year, when he was living in Israel.

The investigation then took a series of turns, for reasons that The Times of Israel discussed in its eventual story. But what I did not know—and what I learned from the reporter that day in mid-June—was that a senior official at the Justice Department had allowed Herzog to flee Israel, presumably by accident, by giving him the details of an ongoing extradition process. A year later, no one seems to know where he is.

By itself, this would be bad enough. The mastermind of a large international fraud had apparently been allowed to escape—for now, at least—as a result of the incompetence of a senior Justice Department prosecutor. But this episode also encapsulated many of the problems that I came to see while working at the agency: relative disinterest in real-world fraud; an obliviousness to the sophistication of criminals who many see as nuisances but who are in fact wreaking widespread havoc; and high-level ineptitude by previously low-level prosecutors who somehow managed to rise quickly in recent years. Together, these trends point to the precarious state of our white-collar criminal enforcement program under the Trump administration.

In January, before the pandemic destabilized federal law enforcement efforts, the number of new federal white-collar prosecutions reached an all-time low, according to data spanning nearly 35 years. Just 359 new defendants were prosecuted for white-collar crime across all 94 federal districts, down 25 percent from five years before.