WSJ What’s News - Trump Administration Backs Away From White-Collar Criminal Enforcement

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

P.M. Edition for April 14. The U.S. administration is backing away from cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets. WSJ reporter Dave Michaels says the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime. And WSJ reporter Peter Grant says Trump’s appetite for tariffs is threatening a post-Covid bounce for the U.S. office space market. Plus, what’s at stake for Meta Platforms—which owns Instagram and WhatsApp—in its antitrust trial brought by the Federal Trade Commission. Pierre Bienaimé hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Trump administration is backing away from prosecuting certain cases of white-collar crime. White-collar crime or cases against executives where there are not clear victims from the misconduct, those don't appear to be popular. Plus, the president's trade war threatens the office space market recovery. And Metta fights to keep Instagram and WhatsApp as its antitrust trial begins. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Pierre Bienemé for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Alex Osala. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that moved

the world today. U.S. investors welcomed a tariff rollback for the tech industry. The exemption for smartphones, computers, and memory chips amounts to a big reprieve for Apple and others that make many items in China. President Trump said this afternoon that he's looking at some tariff pauses to help automakers as well. Shares of companies like Ford and General Motors perked up on the news. In US markets today, the S&P 500 and the Dow rose about 0.8 percent, while the Nasdaq

composite rose about 0.6 percent. Facebook owner Meta Platforms squared off with the Federal Trade Commission today in the start of a trial that could shape the future of antitrust enforcement and force the company to break itself up by selling Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC wants to compel Metta to undo its acquisitions of those two platforms, alleging it wields an illegal monopoly in social media, something Metta denies. WSJ reporter Megan Burbrowski covers Metta and social media and says the company has a lot to lose.

A big chunk of Metta's ad revenue is at stake. Instagram is projected to bring in 50% of Meta's ad revenue this year and so they could lose half of their ad revenue potentially. Instagram is growing among users 18 to 24 and among that group Facebook is expected to see a 2% decline this year and so Instagram is important because it's this way that Meta is continuing to reach young people and bring in new users. This trial is also important in that it sets the stage for what antitrust enforcement could look like in the future.

Some people in the industry thought that with Donald Trump coming to power again, he maybe wouldn't be as hard on some of these companies. And that is proving to not be the case at all. The trial in Washington is scheduled to take about eight weeks. The graphics chip maker Nvidia said it would start producing AI supercomputers manufactured entirely in the United States. The announcement, made today in a blog blog post comes a day after the Trump administration said tariffs are coming for semiconductor imports.

NVIDIA said this will be the first time that AI supercomputers, used to power data centers that solely process artificial intelligence, will be made completely in the US. European authorities are scrambling to break their dependence on the Starlink satellites owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Starlink is indispensable for Ukrainian soldiers who have relied on its terminals for communication, drone control, and artillery coordination since Russia invaded in 2022. But Wall Street Journal correspondent Margarita Stankati told our tech news briefing podcast that the company's dominance has also highlighted the risk of relying on a single U.S. company and its unpredictable owner.

And now Europe is putting its hopes into France's UTELSAT. No one really thought of UTELSAT as a real alternative to Starlink in Ukraine until earlier this year. And geopolitics has everything to do with it. So we've seen this deterioration in the transatlantic alliance under President Trump and that has convinced European leaders that they need to take quick action to end their dependence on America for their defense. And one of the first vulnerabilities they're moving to address is this big reliance on America's dominance

in space. And we can literally pinpoint the moments that UTILSAT suddenly became the focus of attention and became one of the most important companies in Europe, really. And it's when this relationship, this transatlantic relationship, started deteriorating. So when Vice President JD Vance delivered this kind of fiery speech at the Munich Security Conference, that is when UTILSAT's CEO Eva Bernanke first started receiving inquiries from European officials asking if UTILSAT was ready to slip into Ukraine. And you can hear the full story with details on how the low orbit space race is heating

up in this morning's tech news briefing podcast. The first three months of the year saw a rebound in the troubled market for office space. According to the data firm CoStar Group, American businesses leased more space in Q1 than in any quarter since 2019. But President Trump's call for higher tariffs, which is stoking economic uncertainty and financial market volatility, is threatening that turnaround. Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Grant joins me now

with the details. Peter, how big of a problem are these tariffs for the office-based market? Well, it's potentially a big problem. And as you pointed out, the timing is terrible. The office market was just reaching the point where it was finally recovering from a brutal downturn after the pandemic. But now, with all the uncertainty over both the economy and the capital markets,

everyone is taking a pause. And that could be bad for this recovery. What about this 90-day pause to the tariffs that Trump announced last week on most tariffs? Is that providing any further light at the end of the tunnel for brokers and landlords? Well, not really, because that 90-day pause only introduces 90 days more of uncertainty when a lot of tenants are going to simply move to the sidelines and not make decisions. And what the office market needs is for that leasing volume to continue. Well, where does that leave the market? It really depends.

If all of a sudden it looks like these trade war drums stop pounding, perhaps it gets back to where it was. If the trade war escalates, if it seems more and more like there could be a recession, it will hurt leasing. And then we're sort of back to this long dragged out downturn for the office market. Also, we want to keep in mind that another big problem for the office market, not just the slow leasing, has been the high rate of defaults and the high rate of loans going bad.

You have billions and billions of dollars worth of loans that are precarious. And creditors, banks, other lenders have been holding off on foreclosing. But they can only hold off for so long. Now, if we now run into a period of higher interest rates and we have more defaults, the lenders aren't going to be able to hold off and they're going to have to start foreclosing and that's going to create more downward pressure on the entire market. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Grant. Peter, thanks so much. My pleasure.

Coming up, how the Trump administration is redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime. That's after the break. The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement. That includes cases involving foreign bribery, money laundering, and crypto markets. An executive order Trump signed in February said bribery prosecutions hurt the ability of American companies to compete overseas. The move could upend dozens of cases and investigations.

Dave Michaels covers corporate law enforcement for the Wall Street Journal and he joins me now. Dave, what does this move away from white collar enforcement look like in practice? The government is cutting ties with some kinds of enforcement that it did a lot of in the most recent years. So that includes enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and enforcement of anti-money laundering laws in the crypto space. These were areas where under the Biden administration and even under the first Trump administration, there was a lot of activity. We are noticing some themes that are coming to the surface.

First of all, white collar crime or cases against executives where there are not clear victims from the misconduct, those don't appear to be popular. The department is also open to arguments or appeals that defendants were targeted for political reasons, or that some prosecutions are at odds with the Trump administration's goals for economic competitiveness and national security. And then finally, political connections within Trump's world do seem to matter. What's the administration itself saying? Are they talking about a new focus? The administration is saying that they are still committed to white collar enforcement broadly. They say that they want to recoup victims losses when victims are harmed by fraud and that they want to make sure that there's integrity in markets and financial institutions.

That was Wall Street Journal reporter Dave Michaels. Dave, thanks so much. Thanks very much. And you can read our full report about how the Trump administration is retreating from white collar crime enforcement on wsj.com. We'll leave a link in the show notes. In other news, Harvard University said today it will resist the Trump administration's demands to change its governance structure to stop anti-Semitism on campus.

The school said the government is overstepping its authority. Harvard's response sets up a significant fight between the nation's wealthiest university and the federal government, which has threatened to withhold nearly $9 billion in grants and contracts to the university and its affiliated hospitals. El Salvador president Nayib Bukele said today he doesn't have the authority

to bring a migrant mistakenly deported to a maximum security prison in his country back to the U.S. Boukele made the comments during a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia lived with his family in Maryland and was deported in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an administrative error. It's a volatile time for markets, and you may be wondering what that means for your own investments. Wall Street Journal personal economics reporter Imani Moise spoke to our Your Money Briefing podcast and she was asked whether stock owners should take the recent market swings as an

opportunity to do a gut check. Absolutely, especially if you're on the younger side. Because if you've set up your portfolio really in the last five years, then you're very used to things going well for yourself. So a lot of advisors are telling me that clients are realizing that their risk tolerance isn't as high as they thought it was when markets were doing really, really well, now that markets aren't in such great shape.

You can use this as a time to be more realistic about your risk tolerance, but you still shouldn't be making any rash decisions. And that's because if you sell right now, you'll be making those losses real as opposed to just theoretical. You can hear more from Imani on today's episode of Your Money Briefing. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. I'm Pierre Bienimé for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.