The F.B.I. is disbanding a high-profile squad responsible for sensitive investigations into members of Congress and fraud by federal employees, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that comes as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate or marginalize public corruption investigations.
The squad’s members are likely to be reassigned, potentially asked to do immigration work, and its work is expected to be merged with one of the other corruption units in the bureau’s Washington field office, according to a person familiar with the changes.
The special agent in charge of criminal matters at the field office — who was recently responsible for investigating the Biden administration’s green energy grants — was also pushed out of his job, those people said.
The moves, some of the most drastic to date by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, could reduce the bureau’s capacity to fulfill one of its core missions: leading major investigations into public corruption cases that have included, among many others, the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump led by the special counsel Jack Smith.
It follows the decimation of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which had its staffing cut from more than two dozen personnel last fall to a skeleton crew of four to six prosecutors now, according to people briefed on the moves.
Since returning to office, President Trump has taken other actions to downgrade federal law enforcement’s ability to hold the powerful and well-connected to account. He has granted clemency to political allies, fired those who brought cases against the Capitol rioters, and supported the dismissal of bribery charges against the New York mayor, Eric Adams, which prompted the resignation of prosecutors.
A spokesman for the bureau did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The F.B.I. squad, based in the Virginia suburbs, has vast experience handling complicated investigations involving public officials. Getting rid of it also seems at odds with one of the administration’s stated priorities — eliminating fraud, waste and abuse across the federal government, former officials said.
The unit’s disbanding was reported earlier by NBC News.
The bureau’s Washington field office also oversees two other units that investigate corruption in the District of Columbia and Virginia, one of which is expected to pick up some of the duties of the squad that is being dissolved.
Why the special agent in charge was being targeted was not clear. But he was responsible for the overall supervision of the federal corruption squad being dismantled.
The squad works with many other agencies to unearth graft at places like the Pentagon and State Department and has built a reputation for making cases that lead to successful prosecutions. That includes Jack Abramoff, a disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of influence peddling in Washington.
In addition, the unit helped send two Democratic congressmen to prison and oversaw sensitive inquiries into the Clinton Foundation and the former governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, another Democrat.
More recently, agents on the squad investigated a wide-ranging effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election by creating slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in states he had lost. As part of that investigation, federal prosecutors accused Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The administration has acted on other fronts to limit investigations into public corruption. Officials previously ordered the shutdown of an initiative to seize assets owned by foreign kleptocrats, dialed back scrutiny of foreign influence efforts aimed at the United States and replaced the top career Justice Department official handling corruption cases.
In February, President Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries, arguing that such cases hurt the United States’ competitive edge. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said of his decision to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.
Mr. Trump has also issued a wave of pardons to people accused of graft, including three former Republican members of Congress: Duncan Hunter of California, Chris Collins of New York and Steve Stockman of Texas.
He also pardoned former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat who was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated after he was elected president.
Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, his administration officials demanded that corruption charges against Mr. Adams of New York be dropped — suggesting, without evidence, that the case was brought by a glory-seeking Biden appointee and would impinge Mr. Adams’s compliance with the administration’s edicts on immigration enforcement.
In April, a judge dismissed the charges..
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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