Trump to FBI: Stop investigating rich people, crack down on the poor

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading that there’s one law for the rich and another for the poor. For example, under three-strikes laws, you can receive a life sentence for stealing a pair of socks. However, if you commit tens of millions of dollars of securities fraud, you’re out in five on parole.

This is the system that Donald Trump desperately wants to maintain, and he’s perverting the mission of the FBI to do it. In a new report from Reuters, the Trump administration has ordered it to indefinitely deprioritize all white collar crime investigations.

The order to the FBI to stop investigating white collar criminals for the rest of 2025 came as the DOJ also ordered prosecutors to go easy on white collar crime.

Prosecutors have ALSO been told to prioritize prosecuting undocumented immigrants — meaning other cases get dropped. pic.twitter.com/S5gzXDy3PB

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) May 13, 2025

That covers some suspiciously Trumpy-sounding crimes like public corruption, foreign bribery, kleptocracy, and allowing foreign influence into the United States political system. In addition, the standard for prosecution for corporate crimes will be raised, effectively giving license for major companies to ignore the law as they see fit.

FBI agents will now not be keeping an eye on the rich lining their wallets with ill-gotten gains, but have instead been asked to firmly and aggressively crack down on those with almost nothing to their name. As such, agents have been ordered that they need to join the Trump regime’s crackdown on immigrants, effectively making the agency an appendage of ICE.

As per Reuters, Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI head Kash Patel envisage transforming the agency into “immigration enforcers”, likely using their investigative technology and skills to hunt down those working in low-paid jobs, throwing them into a detention center, and then deporting them to some godforsaken foreign hellhole.

Two-tier justice

Hopefully, nobody reading this is dumb enough to miss what’s going on here. Trump and his cronies are effectively putting themselves and their friends above the law. They’re sidestepping having to change it (bad optics) in favor of preventing themselves from being investigated at all and, though it shouldn’t need to be underlined, firmly emphasizing the “white” in “white collar crime”.

What individual FBI agents think of them being repurposed as immigrant hunters is anyone’s guess, though it’s safe to say this isn’t what they signed up for and will be a waste of investigative abilities that could be better put to use solving complex cases of corporate malfeasance.

For years, Trump has run on a platform of “draining the swamp”, insisting that he’s battling against corruption. The reality is quite the opposite, as starkly demonstrated by his $400 million “flying palace” jet bribe by the Qatari royal family. Trump doesn’t want to drain the swamp, he wants to be the King of it, and he and his friends are getting richer at your expense.