A common theme in the Trump administration? Corruption. There’s no shortage of reports detailing Trump leveraging the presidency to line his own pockets — and those of people closest to him. From his family’s cryptocurrency venture(reportedly netted at least $1 billion so far), to adding approximately $4 billion to his personal net worth, Trump is a pro at putting himself first. And that’s just what we know about.
That’s why former federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou founded The Public Integrity Project: to monitor and sue those who seek to bribe government officials — as well as the officials willing to be bribed. Ballou joins Jen to unpack the levels of corruption and explain how imposing legal and reputational costs on corrupt actors now can help curb the fallout later.
Brendan Ballou is the Founder of The Public Integrity Project and a former federal prosecutor, who for two years prosecuted rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He is the author of Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, and the forthcoming When Companies Run the Courts: Forced Arbitration and America’s Secret Justice System.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of the Katrarian. I am delighted to welcome Brendan Ballew. He was a former prosecutor, and in fact, helped prosecute the January 6th insurrectionists. We are thrilled to have him. He is now with the Public Integrity Project. Welcome, Brendan, nice to see you!
Brendan Ballou
Thanks for having me.
Jen Rubin
What is the Public Integrity Project?
Brendan Ballou
We’re a new law firm that’s devoted to raising the legal and reputational cost of corruption in America right now, so there is… I think anybody that’s following the news sees that there is an exploding amount of corruption coming from and around this administration. Unfortunately, so far, you know, so many really worthy, important organizations have been sort of overwhelmed just dealing with the sort of flack of the policies that this administration has been putting out there. Unless effort has been, or less energy has been devoted to going after the underlying corruption that I would argue has sort of enabled this administration and got us to the present point. So, our hope is to sue the people outside of government who are trying to corruptly enable those inside of government, sue those government officials themselves, and then sue to stop the corrupt fruits of their labor.
Jen Rubin
It’s a very interesting strategy, because although the president gets to invoke all kinds of immunity excuses, whether that’s right or not, the people who are, in essence, I don’t know, paying to play, for example, those people may have liability, and I’m interested in what kind of legal theories and what are some… what are some of the ways you’re going after? I can think of the ballroom donators. I can think of the people trying to pay them… pay their way into pardons. I can think of people playing the crypto, game with Trump. Tell us what are some of the legal theories and avenues you guys are exploring?
Brendan Ballou
Absolutely. So, you know, you’re exactly right. The Supreme Court has given the President sort of extraordinary immunity for himself, and also has interpreted the pardon power so broadly that he has the ability to pardon just about anybody for even the most corrupt of reasons, and it’s hard to go after sort of that core pardon power. But there’s still a lot of legal avenues to hold people, responsible, and I think it’s important, you know, even sophisticated viewers and listeners might not, you know, sort of recall that the pardoning power only extends to federal crimes. It doesn’t extend to state crimes, and it doesn’t extend to civil actions against these folks. So, I think you can really break down the legal strategy into two or three different categories. The first is, you know, let’s start with that last group that we were talking about, the sort of fruits of people’s corruption. Well, the ordinary way that you challenge an illegal government action is the way that you challenge any illegal government action, which is the Administrative Procedure Act. You say that the government has been acting in excess of its statutory authority, and arbitrary and capriciously. And that’s, in fact, one of the ways that we’ve challenged the president’s illegal approval of the sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets to, various administration allies. So, you’ve got, you know, sort of the core APA toolbox for going after a lot of corrupt activities. But then when you think about the people inside and outside of government themselves, there are a lot of laws that, you know, frankly have gathered some dust on the shelves, but that were designed for exactly these sorts of situations. Think about the Civil Ricoh Law, which was developed to go after the mafia. You know, you could argue that various, you know, donation committee, campaign committees for this president are exactly the sort of corrupted organizations that are engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity that civil rights was exactly designed to address, common law unjust enrichment. You know, the idea here that you know, even if somebody hasn’t violated a criminal statute, they have unjustly enriched themselves through their corrupt activities. So, you know, you can see people that have gotten their litigations or prosecutions dropped potentially being pursued under those common law theories. So, we’ve got a lot of different legal avenues to pursue here, and I’ll just raise one last thing here. Which is, you know, our mission is to raise the legal and reputational cost of corruption. For so much of the legal work that’s going on around this administration right now. If you’re trying to stop an anti-immigration policy, or an anti-trans policy, or whatever it happens to be. You have to file your complaint, and you have to win on the merits to have any effect at all. Because if you lose, that policy goes into place. With this, the simple filing of the complaint begins to raise the reputational cost of corruption. And hopefully, you know, there’s so much pressure for people to be corrupt right now, that we can create some counter-pressure to try to dissuade them.
Jen Rubin
Fascinating. For the people who are CEOs, they’re on, they’re in charge of major corporations, they’ve been told that this administration is not going to enforce certain white-collar crimes, like the Foreign Practices Act. Most of these crimes have 5-year statute of limitations. Do they understand that they can be prosecuted down the road? Because these laws haven’t been repealed, they’re on the books. And what do those kinds of tools give you? Perhaps the hope for 3-4 years down the road.
Brendan Ballou
Absolutely. Apparently, they don’t remember that federal crimes typically have a 5-year statute of limitations, because they’re engaging in a whole bunch of incredibly suspicious stuff. Now, either folks are not thinking 5 years down the line, or they’re confident that they’re going to get a pardon, or probably most likely, they believe that a future administration is going to be so overwhelmed with cleanup activities that nobody’s going to really get to their, you know, potential criminality. This, again, you know, I don’t want to be sort of self-serving here, but this, again, is sort of what has motivated our project here, which is you need to raise the salience of corruption in both popular discourse and in legal institutions. Unless you do that, corruption is not going to be the priority that it needs to be. And I would argue if you look internationally and historically. Illiberal regimes tend to live or die by their ability to sustain corruption. If the corruption can keep going, the regime can keep going. If the corruption dies up, two things happen. One, the sort of elite people that would be inclined towards, you know, bribery and graft they no longer, you know, really see themselves quite as tied into the administration’s success. And the other thing that happens is the folks that maybe are further away from the Capitol, further away from money, but, you know, supported the regime or the administration, suddenly starts to realize, with all this corruption, that the leader that they supported doesn’t actually support them, but rather supports a very small, very rich elite. And so, I think, you know, we raise the salience of the corruption and increase the odds of future prosecutions, and also increase the odds that there’s actually going to be a future administration, Republican or Democrat, that will pursue this.
Jen Rubin
I’m curious, because the President has accumulated, depending upon what tracking you use, a billion dollars, $5 billion, whatever. Most of this would be prohibited under either the Foreign Emoluments Act or the Domestic Emoluments Act. Is there any way in a future legal regime of clawing back the money that he has taken? Is there a legal theory that the day he leaves office, you file a lawsuit, you say, okay, give all back, you know, the money you took?
Brendan Ballou
Yeah, and let me answer the question just a little indirectly, which is, you know, think about the pardon power, right? You know, there have been people who have been criminally prosecuted, were serving time in prison, have been pardoned, and not just are released from prison, but now all the millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars that they have, you know, unjustly gotten. At least right now, they don’t need to pay back. There’s some really interesting case law, and I want to credit Liz Eyer, the former pardon attorney, for really doing the deep research on this. Suggesting that the pardon power doesn’t actually extend to those restitution obligations. So, you know, you can get freed from prison, but those $600 million, or however many million dollars you may owe to victims, that obligation doesn’t go away. So to get back to your question, you know, think about a world in which Donald Trump perhaps unsurprisingly, pardons himself for all actions in government. Well, that pardon might not extend to the money that he was unjustly able to enrich himself with. So absolutely, I think that there are civil avenues to go after that kind of corruption.
Jen Rubin
And that would certainly be a deterrent going forward for other corrupt leaders. The pardon power we keep being told is absolute. You can pardon someone for a crappy reason, you can pardon someone for a corrupt reason, their personal reason. But that doesn’t alleviate the criminal liability of the person who gave a bribe, potentially, to get that. In other words, he may be pardoned for having murdered somebody, if that’s the pardon, but he wasn’t pardoned for giving the bride to get the pardon. Is that an avenue that can be explored later on?
Brendan Ballou
Absolutely. No, I think you’re exactly right. There’s sort of criminality upon criminality here. If somebody, you know, commits a crime to be absolved of a crime, well, that itself creates a certain amount of liability here. So we’ve got a long, unfortunately, to-do list of things that we’ve got to get through, but that is certainly something that we’ve been kicking around, and if we can find the right defendant and the right plaintiff, it’s absolutely a theory we want to explore.
Jen Rubin
Do you have a guesstimate, and I suppose it depends how you define corruption, of the amount of ill-gotten gain that Trump and his family have accumulated since he took office?
Brendan Ballou
No, I think it’s impossible to estimate, and I think that the purpose was to make it impossible to estimate. You know, one of the more famous deals that’s come out is the UAE investment firm MGX buying $2 billion of the Trump family’s preferred cryptocurrency, which now, World Liberty Financial, as I understand it, the Trump family crypto business, now controls. You know, that’s one deal. And it’s $2 billion. And so you think about, you know, we have any number of stories now of people and companies that donated, for instance, to the Trump Inaugural Committee, who subsequently had their, you know, prosecutions dropped, their civil litigations, their civil investigations dropped, and so forth. Those are stories where we can see, you know, a clear path from, or, you know, a clear sequence of events of a donation occurred, and then a benefit was gained, whether or not there was a causation. But then you see all sorts of extremely high-profile pardons. For which we don’t have, you know, clear, you know, sort of evidence of a prior donation or something like that. So, it raises the specter that there is so much more profiteering going on than even has been publicly reported so far.
Jen Rubin
We saw just this week in testimony that Christine Noem gave, concerning no-bid contracts that she gave out to people that were allegedly linked to relatives, or friends of relatives, or relatives of friends. That seems to be, another form of corruption. In other words, people in power using their positions to enhance other people’s wealth. What are some of the ways in which that money can be recouped, or those people can be held accountable? Yeah, so I’m particularly interested in the Tom Homan example, which you may be familiar with, which is… Oh, yes, the Kava bag!
Brendan Ballou
The Cava bag. So, you know, Border Czar Tom Homan allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash in a, paper bag from undercover FBI agents, reportedly saying that he could help secure various federal contracts if he returned to office. You know, there was, you know, really interesting legal discussion about whether or not that would constitute bribery, given that he wasn’t a government official at the time. But I think that there’s a simpler path here. Even in a world where the administration has absolutely no interest in investigating its own officials, and Tom Homan is still an extremely powerful White House official. I would be extremely interested to see if Tom Homan reported that $50,000 on his state or local tax returns. And so, a world where DOJ and the IRS might not be interested in that question, you know, Tom Homan’s business, as I recall, was incorporated in Virginia. It’d be very interesting for the Virginia Attorney General or a local county prosecutor to see if he, in fact, reported that $50,000. So, I think that’s an example of where we might be able to use state and local authorities to get at some of the alleged wrongdoing that federal prosecutors just seem utterly uninterested in right now.
Jen Rubin
Democrats right now don’t control anything, but I’ve argued people like, Tom Malinowski have argued that it’s important for them to kind of put a flag in the ground, in other words, to send out letters to these people, to put them on notice. And that goes to your issue of actually getting people to think twice before they do those. Do we need more of that? Does Congress need to do more in terms of proactively putting people on notice that there are laws, that there will be investigations, there will be civil remedies?
Brendan Ballou
Oh my gosh, absolutely. And I am… I’ll be blunt, I’m very frustrated by people professing helplessness in the face of this corruption, because if you are a member of Congress, I get it, you’re not in the majority, you don’t get to set the agenda, but people pay attention to you. They read the letters that come on your letterhead, they read your tweets, and so forth. You can raise the salience of corruption in America. And I think it really would benefit members to choose a particular sort of instance of corruption and focus on that. One of the challenges that we have is it’s harder to get people, you know, worked up about 500 instances of corruption than it is to get them worked up around about 1, or 5, or whatever it happens to be. And so, I would really encourage members to think about what is the instance of corruption that has affected my constituents, and how am I going to be raising the ceilings of that corruption every day, every hour, every week? And how can I be creative in thinking about how I can use the courts, how can I use local law enforcement, and local authorities. Partners in civil litigation to help keep the pressure on this sort of corruption, and perhaps even get some of this corruption addressed civilly, even when you don’t have the gavel of a committee or subcommittee.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Let me go back to your work on January 6th. First of all, tell us, roughly, if you recall, how many of these cases you were involved in, in one center or another, and whether these were people who committed violence themselves, or they were just kind of present there, when violence occurred.
Brendan Ballou
Yeah, and I want to be clear, I was a very small part of a very large operation. You know, there was probably a hundred lawyers involved in the project at various times, so I was probably involved in 20, 25 different cases. Yes, several of them assaulted police officers, you know, I believe several of the officers that I’ve talked to involved in various cases, you know, expected or thought that they were gonna die that day. So, yes, for me, the fact of January 6th is very much alive for me, and I know it’s very much alive for the officers that I worked with.
Jen Rubin
What was your reaction when you heard that they were all gonna get pardoned?
Brendan Ballou
Yeah, so I think it was pretty immediately clear, to me at least, that certainly the effect, and I imagine the intent, of the pardons was to create militia or paramilitary forces that are loyal to the president, but ultimately unaccountable to the law. You know, you had hundreds of people who enacted violence in the president’s name, who now, you know, not figuratively, literally were put beyond the reach of the law. I don’t see how you can take any lesson from that other than that. It’s an encouragement to continue to do the thing that you were rewarded for. So I was extremely concerned that, you know, pardon riders would, you know, attack, you know political enemies, you know, smaller minority groups that, you know, were perceived as weaker or defenseless. I think we have seen some of that happen. I think you’ve seen a number of former defendants get arrested. I also think, at some level, you’re seeing the sort of paramilitary or militia action that I feared back from January 20th, 2025, when the pardons first came out, you know, now, propagating through ICE, and unfortunately, it’s happening in a much more organized way.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, the president pardoned these folks, presumably for things they did on January 6th. There are some cases in which they may have committed adjacent crimes or other crimes. Is it possible for them to be prosecuted for those crimes in the future? And do you have a sense of how many people have actually gone out and committed new crimes? Horribly, several of them seem to have committed crimes of sexual violence or sexual abuse against children and others.
Brendan Ballou
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there have beenJanuary 6th defendants, as I recall, who have been either accused or pleaded guilty of various child sex abuse crimes. You know, there are defendants that, you know, have tried to kill officers. I at least one, as I recall, tried to, or threatened to kill the FBI agents that were investigating that was that were investigating them. So, I think that there’s certainly a lot of follow-on criminality that occurred either before or after in these people’s biographies. I, I don’t know how productive it is to, sort of just randomly try to find just sort of random criminality in various January 6th rioters that, you know, were pardoned, but I will say, you know a lot of these people were not stable on January 5th, you know, 2021, you know? And I think you’re seeing that happen in the many arrests of former January 6th defendants that are now occurring. I think many of them, in some ways, January 6th and the follow-on prosecutions were the most exciting things that happened in their lives. And they are now trying to, sort of stay in the limelight, through their activities. And so, all that’s a long way of saying that, yes, I think there needs to be enormous vigilance for rioters that were violent against police officers. I will say a lot of that responsibility is going to fall to state and local officers, because… law enforcement, because the crimes that these folks are committing may, by and large, be local crimes that the federal government doesn’t have immediate jurisdiction over.
Jen Rubin
Alright, last question for you. There seems to be a whole lot of dissembling under oath by members of this administration. Is someone keeping a log of potential, you know, perjury cases, and what’s the statute of limitation on perjury?
Brendan Ballou
That’s a great question. I believe it’s 5 years like most everything else. You know, that’s a little adjacent to, you know, a little far afield from our sort of core anti-corruption stuff, and we’ve, you know, we’re a tiny team, so we’ve got enough on our plate at the moment. But I think it would certainly be worth somebody in civil society to be tracking those sorts of things. You know, you don’t want to go after somebody for some nitpicking on an arguable misstatement or something like that. You know, people make mistakes, but I do… I think I agree with the premise of your question, that there has been enormous dissembling, and dishonesty on behalf of the executive to Congress, I think most recently, in secretly surveilling members, reviewing files from the, Epstein files, Transparency Act, and deceiving allegedly deceiving members about that. You know, that raises core First Amendment separation of powers issues, and so I really hope that somebody with the time and with the resources can, can pursue that.
Jen Rubin
Well, hopefully someone who is a contrarian will be getting on that. Brendan, it is such a pleasure. We hope to have you back as you make progress. If people want to find out more about what you’re doing, what your colleagues are doing, where do they go?
Brendan Ballou
Publicintegrityproject.com, join the listserv, contribute if you can, suggest cases if you can. We really want to hear from folks.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Well, we will definitely look forward to getting updates. There’s no shortage of material, unfortunately. So, thanks so much, have a great day.
Brendan Ballou
Thank you.
