Interesting that this op-ed was published this morning. In light of the Collins news, does it indicate that we are gonna see more prosecution of this stuff, cases having been prepared over the last year, a sort of "deep state" in the DOJ working on a new beat once Trump world took over?

Rampell: America swarming with Manaforts

​By Charlotte Rampell for WaPo via HeraldTribune.com (so no paywall)

[....] Some of Manafort’s alleged crimes, as Trump loves to point out, are more than a decade old!

But the right question isn’t why Mueller is going after Manafort now. It is: Why didn’t someone go after Manafort before? After all, there were just So. Many. Red. Flags [....]

Federal prosecutions of white-collar crime — a category that includes tax, corporate, health-care or securities fraud, among other crimes — are on track this year to reach their lowest level on record, That’s according to data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), whose data go back to 1986. Prosecutions of crimes related to public corruption are also on pace to set a record low. [....]

Some argue that big corporations and the wealthy have become too politically influential. Jesse Eisinger, in his excellent book “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives,” blames a culture of risk aversion in the ranks of the Justice Department. Eric H. Holder Jr., an attorney general under Obama, once suggested that corporate consolidation left some firms too big to jail.

But undoubtedly part of the issue is resources.

After 9/11, for instance, terrorism investigations became more of a priority, crowding out available dollars and personnel for white-collar investigations.

Congress’ draconian budget cuts for the Internal Revenue Service, likewise, caused audit rates to plummet. According to TRAC data, criminal prosecutions referred by the IRS to the Justice Department are about half their level from just five years ago and are poised to dip to a new low this year.

Astonishingly, this decline in enforcement is now being cited as evidence of innocence [....]