Three days before Trump took office for the second time, a former top Obama fundraiser, Frank White Jr., agreed to forfeit $20 million to the U.S. Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative in what might be its last act.
On her first day in office, on February 5, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued 14 directives that included an order to disband Kari, which had recovered billions stolen by dictators, kleptocrats, and their families and inner circles since its launch, in 2010, including $1.4 billion stolen from Malaysia’s 1MDB fund.
White’s forfeiture money was tied to a cache of $4.5 billion stolen from the Malaysian sovereign-wealth fund. This grift is a twisted tale that involves a Wharton dropout turned fugitive named Jho Low, who corrupted a president of Malaysia and his family before becoming an alleged spy for China, which is now sheltering him—if indeed he is still alive. Low, who denied wrongdoing, settled with the Justice Department for more than $1.1 billion but still faces charges of money-laundering and other offenses in a Brooklyn criminal court.
Low got his start attending elite schools, where he befriended the children of the global political elite. He moved on to movie stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio, who in 2017 handed over to the Justice Department Low’s gifts of a $3.2 million Picasso, a $9 million Basquiat, and Marlon Brando’s stolen Oscar. Illicit 1MDB funds even bankrolled films such as The Wolf of Wall Street.
Low also won over Grammy Award–winning hip-hop artist Pras Michel, who introduced him to White Jr., a former office-supplies businessman. White helped Low gain access to the White House, where a photo with Obama bought Low “street cred” with his investors, as did a golf game that White helped arrange between Obama and then Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak. In return, tens of millions of dollars in funds misappropriated from 1MDB were paid to companies that White and others controlled.
White claimed he did not know about the “unlawful source” of the funds at the time. As part of the Justice Department agreement, White’s company, DuSable Capital, amended its Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, disclosing its work for Malaysia, including lobbying the U.S. government for support of a solar project in that country.
Illicit 1MDB funds even bankrolled films such as The Wolf of Wall Street.
Michel wasn’t so fortunate. He is currently awaiting sentencing, having been convicted in 2023 of money-laundering, campaign-finance violations, witness tampering, and failing to register as a foreign agent.
Or maybe his luck just turned.
Bondi, who spent years as a paid foreign agent, earning $115,000 a month lobbying for the government of Qatar, has now, as attorney general, also de-fanged America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires Americans to publicly register when they are hired by foreign governments. Bondi is also pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids U.S. citizens and entities from bribing foreign officials. Trump said that the move would be good for U.S. business.
Bondi has also disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, which was launched less than a week after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.
So far no one in the anti-kleptocracy units has been fired, just reassigned. Bondi wrote in a memo to staff her first day in office that she was shifting the Justice Department’s priorities to fighting drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations. But that makes no sense. Like many Trump diktats, this one is shortsighted to the point of being self-defeating. Foreign-government corruption is not isolated or contained by borders. Weakening those investigations emboldens or abets the very things the department is supposedly now more concerned with, namely cartels and criminal groups.
Most notably, governmental corruption makes sure that the criminals continue to operate.
“They are tipped off by the police that they may be arrested, judges are bribed and let them off. If they do go to prison, they bribe prison officials and continue to operate there. They pay off intelligence services and get domestic and foreign intelligence. They pay off border guards to ensure that their illicit shipments cross the border,” says Louise Shelley, the founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, at George Mason University.
The anti-kleptocracy, anti-corruption, and asset-recovery programs became powerful symbols of the United States’ role as a leader in the global fight against corruption. Once the United States started investigating kleptocracy, countries such as Britain and Switzerland followed suit. Cutting the programs is a blow to U.S. national security, and it’s taking a page out of the authoritarian playbook.
Bondi, who spent years as a paid foreign agent, earning $115,000 a month lobbying for the government of Qatar, also de-fanged America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Gary Kalman, the U.S. director of Transparency International, a global civil-society organization that fights corruption, stated that disbanding the anti-kleptocracy task force and Kari “will significantly diminish the U.S.’s ability to counter the transnational corruption that continues to threaten core U.S. security and economic interests, and that leaves the victims of corruption around the world with incomplete justice.”
“In particular,” he continued, “the effectiveness of [Trump’s] new and more comprehensive sanctions on Iran,” and on Iranian assassins who want him dead, “will rely on the ability of the Justice Department and other partners to counter financial secrecy and track the illicit financing that are moved around the world.”
Kalman adds that Bondi’s “narrowed focus” as outlined in her memorandum “risks allowing corrupt markets around the world to flourish—to the clear detriment of U.S. business and national-security interests.”
The Trump administration is also trying to shut down, or weaken, the U.S. Agency for International Development. “This is a page out of the authoritarian playbook,” Shelley says.
“The earliest research I did in my life was in the Soviet Union, where they used anti-corruption as a political tool, and they [the Trump administration] are now weaponizing the corruption issue against U.S.A.I.D., trying to say that funds have been misused, while they gut everything that is fighting corruption, like cutting down the kleptocracy unit. It’s an old Soviet technique,” Shelley says.
America still lacks corporate transparency, and, although that is changing, law enforcement is challenged when it comes to proving ownership of confiscated villas and yachts.
Even sanctioned oligarchs found work-arounds, thanks to financial secrecy, Western enablers, and an understaffed and underfunded enforcement team.
And yet, despite weak spots, KleptoCapture and Kari sent the right message and stopped some oligarchs from blatantly enjoying their ill-gotten gains in the West, forcing them to abandon the sunny shores of Sardinia and the French Riviera and slink off to second- or third-tier cities such as Dubai, where they buy new castles in the sky.
Kleptocrats need Western enablers to help them launder money and move it to the West. By doing so, they leave their countries in shambles. While the enablers—lawyers, accountants, bankers, brokers, and publicists—get rich, the stolen money helps subvert Western democracies while strengthening autocracies back home.
Quasi-failed states such as Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua, ravaged by kleptocrats, become hollowed-out shells, and people feel forced to leave if they can. According to a study by the Japanese news magazine Nikkei Asia, a record 24.07 million people fled authoritarian regimes in 2023, adding to an epic crisis of global migration. Many of those refugees land on this country’s doorstep, fueling the America First populism that helped bring Trump back to power.
Jennifer Gould is a columnist at the New York Post. She covers real estate, money-laundering, and global corruption
