Bondi's DOJ dropped 23,000 criminal cases -- incl. hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime & drugs

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ProPublica @propublica 2h
New: Under AG Pam Bondi, the DOJ has dropped 23,000 criminal cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases in just the first six months of Trump’s second term.

___In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.

The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.

But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.

In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.

read more: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doj-immigration-bondi-declinations-criminal-investigations