The Biden-Harris administration’s DOJ, under Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco, took a lax approach to white collar crime enforcement, and its final year was no exception. As the Democratic Party apparatus’s post-election reflections continue this week, they would do well to consider this basic question: Was it smart to run a campaign hinging on your opponent’s blatant corruption and white-collar criminal status, despite the failure of the Biden administration to take tangible steps to address the harms perpetrated by corporations and the wealthy during their time in office?
TRAC’s analysis of the latest available DOJ records (through September 2024), released last week, demonstrates that there was barely an increase in prosecutions over 2023, with 4,332 prosecutions—fewer than in all but the final year of the first Trump administration.
In addition to the sliding number of proesecutions—which seem to suggest that the Biden administration was even less motivated to prosecute corporate wrongdoing than corporate scam artist Donald Trump himself—the first three years of the Biden DOJ saw a continued reliance on leniency agreements when addressing the crimes of murderous corporations like Boeing. As we’ve worked with allies to highlight this year, Boeing’s 2018 and 2019 737 Max crashes killed 346 people. Nevertheless, Boeing received yet another “sweetheart deal” and slap-on-the-wrist fine from DOJ in July of this year after violating their 2021 deferred prosecution agreement. (What’s the deterrence impact of “deferred” prosecution if it never actually arrives?)
In a disturbing but, at this point, unsurprising continuation of this trend, DOJ last week announced a tiny fine and deferred prosecution agreement for General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Cruise is a self-driving car producer whose representatives lied to federal regulators during an investigation into an incident where one of their vehicles ran over a pedestrian and dragged her under the car for 20 feet. Thankfully, the victim in this incident survived. But a fine of $500,000 for a company valued at $30 billion before the incident (and, even with its valuation halved in the wake of the controversy, still has its worth measured in the billions), with a parent company valued at almost $162 billion, is pitiful, to say the least.
And with Trump’s team making news this week with plans to “ease…rules for self-driving cars,” likely with an eye toward benefitting Trump mega-donor Elon Musk and his visions of a “robotaxi network,” it seems extremely unlikely that Cruise and its ilk will face harsher consequences over the next four years. The result? A potentially dystopian future featuring city streets filled with driverless cars that can injure and kill pedestrians with relative impunity. And even if that doesn’t come to pass… why risk it? (And can one imagine the risks for corporate misbehavior that is more subtle than killing pedestrians, like leaking chemicals into drinking water?)
The Biden DOJ’s negligent approach to holding corporations accountable for crimes and misconduct up to and including causing the deaths of hundreds of people is characteristic of a Democratic Party that has not shown enough willingness to run populist campaigns, implement populist policies, and work to earn the trust of the people harmed by corporate greed and negligence every day. If voters look at the options before them and see two corrupt political parties too corporate captured to stand up for their interests, can we blame them for choosing the less hypocritical one?
To put it plainly—if Democrats wanted to run and win on an aversion to their opponent’s white collar corruption, it might have been helpful to actually fight white collar corruption while they had the chance.
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