What did Donald Trump do today?

He let a foreign billionaire white-collar criminal off the hook for the dumbest and most corrupt of reasons.

Gautam Adani is an Indian national who was indicted by the Department of Justice in 2024 for his part in a staggeringly large international bribery scheme. Adani didn't just pay billions of dollars in bribes; he also took part in an elaborate scheme to hide the bribes from the United States government. This is the kind of white-collar crime that the DOJ takes extremely seriously because foreign corruption defrauds and disadvantages American markets and investors. That is, it takes it seriously except when Trump, a convicted white-collar criminal himself, is in charge of it.

Today, Adani reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the civil portion of the complaint against him. But that appears to be in concert with a planned settlement in the criminal case too, in which the Trump DOJ would drop all charges against him in exchange for a promise to invest $10 billion in American companies and create 15,000 jobs. 

This proposed deal is shocking for three reasons. First, it is a bedrock concept in ethical prosecution that wealthy criminal defendants shouldn't be able to buy their way out of punishment. The belief that billionaires can always buy their way out of legal trouble is corrosive enough when there's some truth to it, but the Department of Justice has essentially never endorsed the idea that it's a desirable thing, until now.

Second, this kind of vague promise of future investment is one that Trump has sought before, from individuals and foreign countries. But they are virtually never kept, because they're inherently unenforceable. Over and over and over and over and over and over again, Trump has bragged about collecting IOUs in exchange for policy or trade concessions of real value, but it's hard to point to a single dollar of foreign investment that resulted that wouldn't have happened because of normal market opportunities. 

Which leads to the third problem: Adani had already made exactly this "pledge" before he'd offered it up as part of a plea bargain. In fact, he made that promise just a few weeks after the 2024 election—loudly and publicly—and explicitly tied his sudden goodwill towards the United States to Trump's victory.

In other words, Trump's DOJ is about to drop a multi-billion corruption charge because the defendant is wealthy enough to offer Trump a campaign talking point, in the form of a meaningless pledge to make investments he was going to make anyway, that he had already made anyway in an attempt to curry favor with Trump. 

Why does this matter?

• It's wrong to hold the wealthiest people in the world to a lower standard of justice, or no standard at all. 

• Presidents who aren't so eager to take bribes themselves usually have a problem with criminals who offer them.   

• A competent dealmaker wouldn't get taken in by people offering meaningless promises so often.