SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump campaigned on a promise to undo the levers of the justice system that he claimed were weaponized against him. Since taking office, Trump has followed through but not always in big public ways. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been covering all of this. He joins me now along with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez. Hi to both of you.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hey there.
DETROW: Ryan, let me start with your recent reporting. What exactly were you looking at to gauge just how public corruption is being handled and how that's changed?
LUCAS: Well, look, public corruption obviously is a big topic. There are a lot of different aspects to it. So I focused on two things. One is presidential pardons. And so I went through all of President Trump's pardons since he returned to office, and I found that he has pardoned at least 15 former elected officials and their co-conspirators who were either convicted of or charged with corruption offenses.
DETROW: OK, that's one aspect. What's the other part?
LUCAS: The other thing that I looked at is a special unit at the Justice Department that investigates and prosecutes public corruption and election crime cases. It's called the Public Integrity Section, and under the second Trump administration, that section has been absolutely decimated. When Trump returned to office in January of 2025, the unit had 35 to 40 attorneys. That number has now dropped to just two full-time attorneys. At the start of the administration, the unit had around 200 or so open matters - so that means investigations, charged cases. That number has now dropped to around 20. I reached out to the Justice Department for comment on this, didn't get a response.
DETROW: I want to talk about pardons for a moment more. Franco, every president issues pardons. Often, they can be controversial. There does seem to be a pattern in how Trump approaches them, though. What have we seen so far?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. That's right. And what we've seen so far is Trump issuing these sweeping federal pardons of allies and donors and supporters. And it really kind of feeds into this narrative that he started to paint during the campaign. Now, remember, Trump himself at the time was facing charges for mishandling classified documents and trying to overthrow the 2020 election. But Trump did not run away from those indictments. Instead, he channeled them into his campaign, arguing that the establishment was weaponizing the justice system against him. And he had this line that he repeated in speech after speech about how prosecutors were not just attacking him.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you, and I'm just standing in their way.
ORDOÑEZ: And you can make the argument that these pardons that Ryan is pointing out contribute to that kind of broader narrative, that it's not just about him being targeted, but it's the whole system - the whole MAGA system.
DETROW: So, Ryan, give us some examples of who exactly is being pardoned.
LUCAS: Sure. There's a Virginia sheriff who was convicted of taking $75,000 in bribes, and in exchange, he was appointing businessmen as deputies. There's a former speaker of the Tennessee State House and an aide of his who were convicted in a kickback scheme that involved taxpayer money.
But really, the one that sticks out to me most is a pardon for a former Las Vegas councilwoman. Her name is Michele Fiore. She was found guilty of pocketing around $70,000 in donations meant for memorials to honor police officers killed in the line of duty and spending money instead on herself, including for cosmetic surgery, for rent, as well as her daughter's wedding.
DETROW: Are these pardons only going to Republicans?
LUCAS: No. More than half of them have gone to Trump's own party, including the ones that I just mentioned, and there does appear to be a partisan aspect of this. But yeah, Trump has pardoned a couple of Democrats, as well. One is former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. He's somebody who's bonded with Trump in recent years. They both believe that they were unfairly targeted by the Justice Department. Another Democrat is Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, who Trump was courting to try to get to change parties. Cuellar, in the end, did not.
To be clear, though, the White House defends all of these pardons. It told me that Trump issued these pardons to a variety of people, including folks who were victims of what the White House says was a weaponized justice system under President Biden.
DETROW: So, Franco, all of this is a big part of Trump's political identity. Can you explain how the administration views and thinks about corruption more broadly?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, I mean, just building on what Ryan just said, I mean, Trump and his allies have long said that the FBI and DOJ were biased and, in the past, were selectively going after Trump and his allies while excusing the misconduct of people in the establishment, like, they would argue, the Bidens and the Clintons. And this argument that they're making and they're saying is that being these pardons are less about excusing corruption and instead about rebalancing a justice system that has already lost a lot of public credibility.
DETROW: Ryan, we started with those surprising stats from the Public Integrity Division. When an entire department is just taken apart in that way, who actually feels that impact?
LUCAS: The current and former officials that I spoke with for this story say it's actually smaller states and rural areas that are going to be hit hardest by this, and that's because public corruption cases - they're very time intensive, very resource intensive. And big city U.S. attorney's offices have the means, the staffing to still do them. But smaller states and more rural places, that's where the Public Integrity Section would step in with resources and expertise and do these cases to hold corrupt state and local officials to account.
An example of that is the prosecution of a former police officer in a small town in Pennsylvania who was convicted of bribery and other offenses, including using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favors and prosecutions. And people tell me that without the Public Integrity Section doing these sorts of cases, it's likely that those sorts of abuses of power are going to continue unchecked.
DETROW: Now, Franco, corruption typically has not necessarily been a partisan issue. I have seen Democrats and Republicans charged with corruption crimes. I have seen Democrats and Republicans prosecute corruption crimes. Is this changing under Trump?
ORDOÑEZ: It is. I mean, it's almost becoming a politically loaded word, depending on who says it or what party. You know, in the Trump arena, it's almost seen as a badge of honor for someone who's challenged biased institutions enough to attract retaliation. And the long-term concerns, I'd argue, are it diminishes faith in federal prosecutions, in the rule of law. That once, more broadly, had bipartisan support, but that's really less and less the case these days.
LUCAS: And I'll just kind of jump in here to add that if you step back and look at the pardons and the changes at the Justice Department as a whole, experts say the administration appears to be sending the message that public corruption just isn't a big deal, that it isn't something worth focusing on, and there's a lot of concern about the long-term impact of this because people that I talked with say, if you don't have enforcement and public corruption is allowed to go unchecked, over time, that eats away at government, at public trust in government, and you end up with a kind ofbroken system where public officials serve themselves first and the public comes second.
DETROW: That is NPR's Franco Ordoñez and Ryan Lucas. Thanks to both of you.
ORDOÑEZ: Thank you, Scott.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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