When the topic is immigrants or Democratic cities, President Donald Trump loves to talk about crime. But when it comes to Wall Street bankers and C-suite executives, he tends to keep his mouth shut.

Within the first 100 days of his second term, Trump pardoned a slew of financial fraudsters. And in February, he signed an executive order announcing that his administration would pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law passed in 1977 that was designed to prevent American citizens and companies from bribing foreign officials to serve their own business interests.

Now, it’s becoming clear how Trump’s Department of Justice likely intends to handle financial crimes. If these crimes involve drug cartels or political opponents — anything that fits his narratives that immigration is dangerous and that Democrats are corrupt — then they merit the DOJ’s attention.

This month, for example, Trump accused California Sen. Adam Schiff of committing mortgage fraud. Similarly, the DOJ opened an investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James’s real-estate transactions — the same Letitia James who filed a lawsuit against the Trump Organization that resulted in a judge ordering Trump to pay over $450 million.

But if Trump’s allies or major corporations engage in some corruption to get ahead, then the DOJ might be inclined to just look the other way.

How the DOJ’s white-collar crime priorities are shifting

On paper, the Trump administration’s words have not necessarily indicated a more dramatic shift in priorities than the routine modifications you might see from one administration to the next. “What I see in the actual policies and the details that are emerging is sort of more of the fine-tuning you would expect with a change in administration, consistent with not only the first Trump administration but also prior Republican administrations,” said Joseph Facciponti, a former federal prosecutor who now serves as the executive director of NYU School of Law’s Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement.

Still, there are signs that the Trump........

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