Former DOJ Official Sees Task Forces, Hiring Spree as ‘Lasting Legacies’ to Be Felt Under Trump
Although President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle the federal bureaucracy in Washington, a key architect of recent DOJ export control and sanctions initiatives believes those efforts will echo through the next administration.
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That includes work begun by the interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force and Task Force KelptoCapture, said David Lim of White & Case, who served as the national coordinator for the strike force and who helped build Task Force KelptoCapture as a senior export control and sanctions prosecutor with DOJ. It also includes the agency’s recent hiring surge and the announcement in September of the Bureau of Industry and Security's first-ever corporate enforcement chief, tasked with coordinating with DOJ on corporate investigations (see 2409120007).
“The hiring of these new prosecutors, the hyper focus on these issues, the creation and filling of these new corporate czar positions -- these are lasting legacies,” Lim said in an interview. “The foundation and the framework is there for this to continue to be a priority for any new administration.”
Lim, who co-led the team of prosecutors investigating Russia-related trade and sanctions violations under Task Force KelptoCapture, said that task force and the Disruptive Technology Strike Force helped officials across agencies coordinate earlier and more often. They also helped foster a “department-wide commitment” to focus on export control and sanctions issues, allowing DOJ to devote more resources to investigations, said Lim, who left DOJ in May.
In the year after DOJ and BIS launched the strike force in early 2023, the group helped bring charges in 14 cases involving alleged sanctions violations, export control violations or illegal transfers; assisted in issuing temporary denial orders against 29 entities; and contributed to investigations that resulted in people and companies being added to the Entity List and the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals List (see 2402230051).
While Lim said it’s unclear whether those two task forces will continue in their current form, he said he expects the new administration to continue to prioritize investigations that look to protect advanced U.S. technologies.
“These aren't tools that are going to go back into the box,” he said. “It's just going to be a matter of how they're deployed under a new administration.”
He also pointed to DOJ’s announcement in 2023 that it planned to hire 25 new export control and sanctions lawyers (see 2303070023). That should be a signal to companies that the flurry of corporate prosecutions over the last year is likely to continue, Lim said, and enforcement risks could be on the rise.
“When you've got dedicated people whose entire job description is to focus on one particular problem set,” he said, “naturally, the odds just become worse for the private sector.”
But Lim also said it’s not all “doomsday” for corporate compliance teams, pointing to DOJ efforts in recent months to update its voluntary self-disclosure policies (see 2302060034). Those updates, along with similar changes to BIS disclosure policies (see 2409120017 and 2402130013), were partly designed to encourage more self-reporting, including for more serious violations.
DOJ in March said it was seeing an uptick in voluntary self-disclosures (see 2403110043), and in May the agency declined to prosecute a Massachusetts biochemical company that disclosed its role in an illegal export scheme involving China (see 2405220037).
Lim said it’s “critical to national security” that the government and companies are able to work together to prevent export and sanctions violations. But he also said the government needs to keep its promise that it will offer credit to businesses that self-report.
“If the private sector starts to see nothing but significant enforcement actions against corporations who are trying to disclose and do the right thing, then there's naturally going to be a chilling effect,” Lim said. “We'll wait to see what that looks like under a new administration, but the framework is there for this new administration to take and use.”