type: timeline_event
By March 2026, the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section -- the unit created after Watergate specifically to prosecute corruption by government officials at all levels -- had been reduced from 36 full-time lawyers to just two. NOTUS reported the collapse in detail, noting it represented the smallest the section had been since its founding in 1976.
The decimation followed a cascade of resignations in protest and politically motivated reassignments. The most visible early rupture came when the Trump DOJ ordered the Public Integrity Section to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. John Keller, the section's acting chief, refused and resigned. Other attorneys followed. When Pam Bondi's DOJ subsequently demanded that remaining lawyers decide within one hour whether they would dismiss the Adams charges or face firing, a further exodus resulted.
Beyond the Adams episode, attorneys departed as the section was stripped of its core mandate: rather than directly handling cases, its surviving staff were reassigned to advise U.S. attorneys' offices around the country -- a function that requires far more lawyers than two. The section also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.
The practical consequences were severe. The section could no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys' offices on how to build corruption cases against crooked government officials, nor prosecute new cases on its own. NBC News reporting noted the simultaneous gutting of FBI anti-corruption squads, disbanding of the unit that investigated congressional misconduct, the issuance of pardons to Trump's political allies, and the effective end of a 50-year policy keeping the DOJ independent of the White House in criminal matters.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse demanded answers from the DOJ on the dismantling of the section. The collapse ensured that the federal government's principal institutional mechanism for prosecuting public officials who abuse their offices was functionally inoperative during a period when critics argued it was most needed.