Ryan Lucas

One example is a case against a small town Pennsylvania police officer who was convicted of bribery and other crimes, including using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favors in prosecutions.

And it's cases like these, people say, that are likely to slip through the cracks without the public integrity sections.

Well, legal experts, current and former officials that I spoke with say the message from the administration appears to be that it is indifferent at best to tackling the problem of public corruption.

And looking down the road in the longer term, the concern is that if corruption is allowed to go unchecked, that has a corrosive effect.

It eats away at government, at public trust in government.

And you can end up with a sort of broken system where public officials routinely serve themselves first and the public second.

Thank you.

Smaller states and more rural places, that's where the public integrity section would step in with resources and expertise and do these cases to hold corrupt state and local officials to account.

An example of that is the prosecution of a former police officer in a small town in Pennsylvania who was convicted of bribery and other offenses, including using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favors in prosecutions.

And people tell me that without the public integrity section doing these sorts of cases, it's likely that those sorts of abuses of power are going to continue unchecked.

Cole Allen was previously charged by criminal complaint with three counts, including, most notably, trying to assassinate President Trump.

Now the indictment adds a fourth count, assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon.

Prosecutors say Allen traveled from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to try to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Allen was stopped by Secret Service agents second after he ran past a security checkpoint.

He is being detained pending trial.

He is scheduled to be back in court next week for his arraignment.

Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington.

In a new court filing, the Justice Department says Cole Allen traveled across the United States with dangerous weapons to attack President Trump and other senior administration officials.

It says Allen intended to kill and he fired a shotgun while trying to storm the dinner.

Simply put, prosecutors say Allen poses an uncommonly serious danger to the community and should remain locked up ahead of any eventual trial.