- in United States
Scan the ABA White Collar Crime Institute agenda and you can see where the bar thinks enforcement is heading: anti-corruption, antitrust, tax, and the growing role of technology in investigations. Despite dominating both the current administration's enforcement agenda and the world we live in, national security only comes up tucked inside the Sanctions and Export Control Enforcement panel. The half-empty room at the panel told its own story.
But here's what's actually happening: national security-driven enforcement has been steadily expanding for years, and what once lived in a narrow lane of export control and sanctions regulatory violations now reaches across a much broader range of trade and financial activity. Investigations that start with an export control question don't stay there. Prosecutors want to know whether goods were misclassified to dodge tariffs, routed through intermediary jurisdictions to disguise their destination, or backed by false documentation about origin, value, or end use. They're looking at financial transactions to see whether companies tried to hide the real recipient of controlled technology. Sometimes these investigations intersect with diversion networks or other organized criminal activity.
The real story isn't that trade enforcement tools are novel. It's that national security and foreign policy priorities are now dictating where and how those tools are implemented. Sanctions, export controls, and tariffs aren't regulatory compliance exercises anymore — they're instruments of geopolitical and economic security. That's exactly why U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stood up the Trade Fraud Task Force: trade violations don't arise in a vacuum. They show up as part of complex international schemes involving diversion and concealment. Working those cases requires coordinating across agencies and legal authorities, which is exactly what the task force does.
This isn't an argument that national security is absent from the white collar conversation. It's that the conversation keeps putting it in a box.
For those who did attend, today's panel walked through how the administration is deploying these national security enforcement tools — and attempting to coordinate their use — across a range of geopolitical flashpoints. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and China each present distinct enforcement dynamics, and the government is using sanctions, export controls, and related authorities differently in each context. The coordination isn't always seamless — panelists noted that the interagency alignment that characterized earlier enforcement efforts, particularly against Russia, has frayed in some respects. But the direction of travel is clear: these prosecutorial tools are being wielded as instruments of foreign policy as much as law enforcement.
Keep following Enforcement Edge for more coverage from the 2026 White Collar Crime Institute.
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