The Trump administration has moved sharply away from charging companies over the wrongdoing of employees, recently closing a string of criminal investigations with lenient resolutions or no charges at all.
In matters involving Alibaba, EagleBank and Abbott Laboratories, the department declined to charge companies even when prosecutors thought executives or managers were involved in the wrongdoing. In those cases, the department didn't charge any individuals.
Corporate investigations and prosecutions that were happening a few years ago "have pretty much been dialed way back," said Evan T. Barr, a former federal prosecutor now with the law firm Reed Smith. "So if you're in the world of financial services or a large public company, you can breathe a lot easier."
Charging companies is the strongest weapon in the Justice Department's arsenal for punishing businesses that violate the law. Convictions can send a strong message that wrongdoing carries public consequences. But businesses say they can also hobble a firm's ability to get financing or compete for federal contracts, and other critics say that tends to hurt shareholders and employees more than executives.
In some cases, prosecutors have spared big companies from that risk by putting them on a form of corporate probation known as a deferred prosecution agreement. If the company avoids trouble over a period of several years, the Justice Department dismisses its charges. Companies typically admit to their violations, pay fines and undertake compliance and leadership changes to deter future wrongdoing.
The Justice Department says companies aren't being let off easy. "All corporate cases that the department resolved this year were done so in a public fashion and were driven by the facts, the evidence, and the law -- not a preference for any particular outcome," Assistant Attorney General Tysen Duva said.
Over the past few years, the Justice Department obtained guilty pleas from about 60 companies a year, according to data from law firm Gibson Dunn. Some of those included cases involving units of Goldman Sachs, Allianz Global Investors, Monsanto and TD Bank.
So far this year, 12 companies have pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges. At least six companies have reached deferred prosecution agreements, including refiner Phillips 66 and medical-waste specialist Stericycle, acquired by Waste Management in 2024.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said prosecutors shouldn't view prosecuting companies as their goal and should instead focus on holding individual wrongdoers accountable.
"Companies don't go to jail, people do," Blanche said in a December speech. "The strongest deterrent to future misconduct is seeing a corrupt executive held to account."
The Justice Department this year dropped its long-running prosecution of Turkish state-owned lender Halkbank for allegedly evading U.S. sanctions on Iran.
And last year, the Trump administration dropped charges against Boeing. The aerospace giant had been set to plead guilty to misleading air-safety regulators but instead paid a $243 million fine and received a nonprosecution agreement. That is the same form of leniency that prosecutors granted to Alibaba and EagleBank, which requires them to admit wrongdoing but spares them from being charged.
In the past, the department has offered leniency to companies for helping to identify and prosecute the individuals who committed crimes. But white-collar lawyers say the Trump administration doesn't seem to be emphasizing that strategy.
"My general sense is corporations are being treated much more leniently, " said Robert Luskin, a white-collar lawyer at Paul Hastings. "What I don't see is a corresponding rise in individual prosecutions."
The department in recent weeks reached two settlements with companies in which prosecutors didn't charge any individuals.
In one, involving Alibaba, prosecutors overseeing the investigation had wanted to charge the Chinese e-commerce giant with felonies, including violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Controlled Substances Act, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of the prosecutors thought Alibaba should have been required to plead guilty, the people said.
In the end, Alibaba admitted that it processed more than $200 million in illicit sales of pharmaceuticals, chemicals and equipment such as pill presses that could be used in the manufacturing of illegal drugs, according to the nonprosecution agreement it received. Alibaba agreed to pay $325 million to the government in fines and forfeiture.
The company didn't respond to requests for comment.
Prosecutors last month resolved a probe of Bethesda, Md.-based EagleBank without levying charges. In its nonprosecution agreement, the lender admitted that it allowed a favored client whose father was in business with the bank's then-chief executive to write checks he didn't have the cash to cover.
EagleBank also approved the client for a federally guaranteed loan even after a top lending officer ruled it was unsound. EagleBank backdated the client's loan payments to make it appear as though they were on time, the settlement says. A bank spokeswoman declined to comment.
While Blanche and others have indicated the department is focusing on prosecuting employees rather than companies, it has also granted leniency or dropped charges against people it accused of wrongdoing.
The department in January gave a deferred prosecution agreement to the chief executive of a technology contractor who had been charged with defrauding the Securities and Exchange Commission. The contractor operated a Maryland data center that stored public-company data that the SEC distributes for investors.
Prosecutors had alleged that Deepak Jain, chief executive of AiNET, misled the SEC into awarding him $10.7 million for providing it with the use of his firm's data center. They said Jain submitted letters from a security-consulting firm that rated his data center at the most reliable and highest-performing tier. The consulting firm didn't exist and hadn't inspected the facility, according to Jain's admission.
There were good reasons for not prosecuting the case, which should have been handled exclusively as a civil dispute, said Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Jain. The executive acknowledged it was a mistake to use the consulting firm's name for certification, but the SEC under the contract had the responsibility to review the facility for itself, Davis said. The SEC never claimed it lost data, Davis added.
The Justice Department this month suspended the prosecution of three former executives of Australian shipbuilder Austal, which pleaded guilty in 2024 to securities fraud and obstructing a Defense Department audit of its finances. The men faced fraud charges and had been set to go to trial in October.
The department instead recommended the defendants be diverted to a program for first-time offenders that allows them to have the charges dismissed.
Write to Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 18, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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