By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration is considering cutting most of the lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department unit that handles public corruption cases, four people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
The people said that Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti told several Public Integrity Section employees that the majority of the attorneys who work in the unit would be offered transfers to other positions, or else they could face layoffs.
The plan targets a Justice Department unit where several supervisors pushed back on a directive from Justice Department leadership to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
Approximately 20 attorneys would face reassignments to handle cases involving drugs, violent crime or immigration, leaving a handful behind, two of the people said.
The four people requested anonymity to discuss the department’s internal moves.
A Justice Department spokesperson said that no final decisions have been made, and that leadership is still looking at resources broadly across the department.
The changes under consideration would also shift control over public corruption and election-related cases from the Washington-based unit to U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country, the four people said. The unit would no longer be responsible for prosecuting cases, and would instead play a consulting role.
The Public Integrity Section typically handles the department’s most politically sensitive cases, including cases against local, state and federal elected officials.
“This decision to dismantle the section charged with maintaining ‘public integrity’ in government by a President who has escalated corruption to a new level is yet another piece of President Trump’s purge of all forms of accountability in the federal government,” said Democratic U.S. Representative Dan Goldman of New York, a former federal prosecutor.
Following his 2020 election defeat, which Trump continues to claim falsely was the result of widespread fraud, he faced two federal investigations, one related to his attempts to overturn his loss and another related to retaining classified documents after leaving office.
The Public Integrity Section was consulted in advance before Special Counsel Jack Smith brought the election case, as required by the Justice Department’s rules.
Trump has repeatedly said he viewed both cases as politically motivated attempts to prevent him from returning to power.
Five attorneys from the Public Integrity Section and a sixth senior career Criminal Division attorney who supervised the section resigned last month over demands from Justice Department leadership to dismiss the Adams case, which was originally brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
Even before the dissension over the Adams case, the Trump administration moved to reassign the former chief of the section, Corey Amundson. He resigned from the department rather than accept the reassignment.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Lincoln Feast.)
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