The Justice Department maintains a comprehensive list of corporate crime settlements.

The Trump Justice Department refused to make the list public.

And now the Biden Justice Department is refusing to release the list.

So last week, Jon Ashley filed a lawsuit to force the Biden Justice Department to release it.

Ashley is a law librarian at the University of Virginia School of Law. 

Ashley has helped build one of the most comprehensive publicly available compilations of corporate crime settlements — it’s called the Corporate Prosecution Registry, which now features more than 350 deferred and non prosecution agreements. 

But Ashley says that the Department of Justice maintains a complete list of these agreements. 

And he wants to get his hands on that list to compare it against the Corporate Prosecution Registry.

Ashley also wants the Justice Department to make public non prosecution agreements that were announced by the Department of Justice in press releases but that were never made public.

Ashley has been seeking the documents through the Freedom of Information Act process for more than a year, but according to the lawsuit, the Justice Department “has improperly withheld” the documents.

In November 2020, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) called on the Justice Department to release the corporate crime database.

“It is critical that the Department, regardless of presidential administration, be fully transparent in its dealings with powerful corporate defendants,” Raskin told Corporate Crime Reporter last year. “I have asked the Department for a full public accounting of all non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements entered into by the Department of Justice with corporate criminal defendants. I trust and believe that the Department is working in good faith to provide me that information and I look forward to a prompt full accounting.”