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In January 2019, the federal government brought a reported 337 new white-collar crime cases—a modern-day low, down 35.7 percent from the level of five years ago, according to the latest Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University.
The Syracuse project monitors these numbers partly to call attention to performance differences among U.S. Attorney’s offices. Many of the lawyers thus employed are well-heeled folks who have revolved out of, and/or plan to revolve into, lucrative careers in private practice – a circumstance with the potential to diminish their enthusiasm for cases against rich and powerful malefactors. We should be doing everything we can to remind them of their prosecutorial duty and call out those who conspicuously evade it. As the Manafort case reminds us, however, the ranks of law enforcement include plenty of investigators, prosecutors and judges who are dedicated to their work and even take special satisfaction (as they rightly should) from assignments that give them a chance to bring down the sort of criminals who are accustomed to thinking of themselves as beyond the reach of the law.
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