Revolving Door Project | Introducing “Watchdog Weekly”

Shedding light on Corporate America’s political power plays

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Welcome back to the Revolving Door Project’s weekly newsletter, which is getting a new name: Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been writing this newsletter since the end of 2018, through three presidential administrations, two general elections, and an ongoing crisis of corporate accountability. Since the beginning, we’ve scrutinized the subtle ways in which corporate wealth shapes our politics: not only through direct spending and lobbying, but via the revolving door between industry and government, through interest groups and formal and informal networks, media influence, and more. We exist to help fill the vacuum of knowledge about who holds power and how power is wielded. We are watchdogs, and we wanted a name for this newsletter that reflects our mission to shed light on the ways that money corrupts politics which may otherwise evade scrutiny. Thanks for being a part of this project.

– Jeff Hauser, Executive Director, Revolving Door Project

These are dark days indeed in America, where the explosive revelations of political bigwigs’ relationships with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including the sitting president, do not guarantee accountability. Our stance is simple: every elite insider implicated in wrongdoing by those files, whether Democrat or Republican, should be exiled from holding positions of power and sway over matters of the public interest. From all the partisan flip-flopping and cross-party donating of America’s economic elites, it should be clear where their loyalties lie: with access to power.

While President Trump seeks to distract the public from his deep ties to Epstein by embracing other criminals, Larry Summers—now in the spotlight for his utterly disgraceful relationship with Epstein—was helping shape the Democratic answer to Trump’s lawlessness. Summers is one of the key figures our organization has consistently criticized for his extensive corporate ties and the terrible consequences of his economic advice. His exit from public prominence should be permanent. What this nauseating saga reveals is a culture of elite impunity rotting the American dream from the top down. That’s what we’re up against.

We live in an era of gilded presidential ballrooms, funded by corporate donors seeking favors from a government that’s giddily raising healthcare premiums and cutting food stamps. In this economy, grifters and the already-rich can get ahead, but more and more people struggle to afford the essentials of life: housing, healthcare, food, electricity. Anyone who wants to take the mantle of leadership after the calamities of the Trump administration must be willing to dismantle this broken status quo without apology.

Trump’s Justice Department: Protecting Instead of Prosecuting Criminals

As our Dylan Gyauch-Lewis recently wrote in The Intercept, the Trump administration’s overt corruption can be viewed as “the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced.” We are tracking attacks on the staffing, funding, and regulatory powers for enforcement actions at federal agencies, complementing the work of other organizations like Public Citizen’s tracker of dropped corporate enforcement cases. The cumulative damage to the government’s ability to hold powerful wrongdoers accountable is significant.

Trump’s Justice Department has explicitly scaled back resources dedicated to white collar crime in order to prioritize targeting immigrants. The call for the U.S. to “just sink the boats” of suspected drug cartels apparently came from inside the Justice Department, according to recent reporting on the February remarks of then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, and has since been defended by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Meanwhile, the OLC is also arguing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects the public against consumer financial crimes, can’t legally access its funding.

With the Justice Department being weaponized to defend the actions of the convicted white collar criminal in office, it should hardly be surprising that prosecutions against corporate criminals have reached new lows. This trend isn’t new, but it is worse now than it has ever been. Convictions against corporations for financial, tax, and other business fraud have steadily decreased throughout the 21st century. As the nonprofit data research project TRAC concludes their 2025 report on the dwindling federal prosecution of white collar crime, “A lack of enforcement against crimes of fraud or anti-trust activities raises serious questions about constitutional guarantees and the bedrock principle that no one is above the law in the United States.”

Alexis Loeb, formerly an attorney in the Justice Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, described “a whole series of signals that the administration would de-emphasize the prosecution of corruption,” and ideals of “promoting the rule of law” quickly falling away. Loeb is one of sixty former DOJ attorneys that the New York Times recently interviewed, narrativizing the chaotic transformation of the Justice Department into Donald J. Trump’s personal law firm. The attorneys describe “being asked to drop cases for political reasons, to find evidence for flimsy investigations and to take positions in court they thought had no legitimate basis. They also talked about the work they and their colleagues were told to abandon — investigations of terrorist plots, corruption and white-collar fraud.”

Peter Carr, a former senior communications adviser at the DOJ, told the Times that “prosecutors [were] targeted simply because the case they brought was something that current D.O.J. leadership did not like.” Dena Robinson, a former attorney in the Civil Rights Division, explained that since Trump took office, “Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration already had.” Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental Ethics Office, recalled getting “a call from the general counsel at the F.B.I. about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, Kash Patel, felt like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts. I reminded him that his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.”

“I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore. It’s become Trump’s personal law firm,” Robinson concluded. “I think Americans should be enraged.”

Now the Justice Department is being mobilized by Trump to distract the public from the unfolding revelations of Epstein’s relationship with the president, about whom Epstein said: “I am the one able to take him down.” A few hours after Trump posted on Truth Social calling for a DOJ investigation into Epstein’s relationships with prominent Democrats including Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Reid Hoffman, Pam Bondi announced that the DOJ would initiate the investigation. Several legal experts have indicated that a pending investigation may allow Trump to prevent some of the Epstein files from being publicly released, even as Congress moves to do so.

Under the next administration, the work of holding accountable the political and career Justice Department officials who have broken the law during this era of rampant corruption will be challenging and grim but essential. Merrick Garland wasn’t up for the job of de-Trumpifying the Justice Department under Biden, and his inability to act with courage and decisiveness laid several of the stones that paved the way for another Trump administration. We cannot afford to make that same mistake again, and promote appeasers to roles that require leaders.

Image Credit: the photograph of President Trump signing a bill by Daniel Torok is in the public domain.