The Trump era was a great time to be a white collar criminal.
According to a new report by Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, “corporate impunity increased to record levels during President Trump’s last year in office, with federal prosecutions of corporate crime plunging to the lowest level in more than 25 years.”
Just 94 corporate criminals were prosecuted in 2020, the lowest number on record since the U.S. Sentencing Commission started releasing corporate prosecution statistics in 1996.
Meanwhile, according to the Duke University/University of Virginia Corporate Prosecution Registry, Trump’s Department of Justice entered 45 deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements with corporate offenders in 2020. That’s a 73% increase from 2019’s 26 agreements and means dozens of white collar criminals will face no penalty for their infractions.
The report identifies specific offenders that benefited from federal leniency including Novartis, the pharmaceutical giant, and Monsanto, the biotech firm. Banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and HSBC were all handled with kid gloves.
So was Chipotle. From the report:
From 2015 to 2018, Chipotle Mexican Grill, a fast food chain restaurant, was implicated in at least five food borne illness outbreaks that sickened over 1,100 customers in California, Massachusetts, Ohio and Virginia, leading to the company resolving food safety violations with a deferred prosecution agreement. The statement of facts included in the agreement noted that employees felt they could not take sick leave and relays the story of an employee who was ordered to continue working even after falling so ill at work that the employee vomited on the job. An outbreak of 141 norovirus infections in the Boston area was attributed to the sick Chipotle employee.
The report concludes, “This lenience toward the biggest multinational corporations sends the unmistakable message that the powerful are above the law. It is not, as Trump likes to say, “law and order.” It is two-tiered justice.”
The reports author, Rick Claypool, laid out recommendations for the Biden administration to reverse the trend. He highlighted them on Twitter:
