1. United States
2. N.C.
3. Letter

The elimination of the KleptoCapture Task Force and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative 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. These anti-kleptocracy initiatives have been instrumental in U.S. efforts to enforce and ensure effective impacts of our sanctions, for example. They have led to the identification, freezing, and seizing of billions of dollars controlled by supporters of America’s adversaries. In particular, the effectiveness of new and more comprehensive sanctions on Iran will rely on the ability of the Justice Department and other partners to counter financial secrecy and track the illicit finances that are moved around the world. For these reasons, we strongly urge the Attorney General to reconsider these decisions and to reinstitute both initiatives, perhaps under a sharper, America First focus. Similarly, for more than 50 years, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has been a model for countering corruption around the world, leading to untold numbers of corrupt officials and other criminals being held accountable. And the recent addition of the bipartisan Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, the most important anti-foreign-bribery law since the FCPA, empowers the U.S. Government to protect American citizens and businesses from bribe demands that take place abroad. While we are pleased that future FCPA and FEPA investigations and prosecutions regarding transnational criminal organizations and cartels will have fewer bureaucratic loopholes to jump through, the Memorandum’s overall, narrowed focus of enforcement for these laws risks allowing corrupt markets around the world to flourish—to the clear detriment of U.S. business and national security interests .