President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has been criticized after it moved to drop a corruption case against a former Fox executive Hernán López and dozens of other international football corruption cases and hundreds of millions of dollars in recovered penalties.

The DOJ moved to drop its conviction of López, a former Fox executive who oversaw the network’s Latin American sports broadcasting business, convicted of multiple crimes related to the FIFA corruption investigation that began in 2010. López was involved in a scheme to funnel millions of dollars to the heads of FIFA in exchange for the rights to broadcast the World Cup and multiple high-profile tournaments in South America. He was convicted alongside a marketing company he worked with, Full Play Sports, in 2023.

John Sauer, DOJ’s top Supreme Court litigator, recently relayed to Eastern District of New York chief prosecutor Joseph Nocella that he must ask a judge to overturn guilty verdicts of the former chief executive officer of Fox International Channels and an Argentine marketing company that were unanimously upheld by a federal appellate panel in July according to people familiar with the situation.

Nocella reached out to Sauer to urge him to reconsider and not drop the case, according to a person briefed on the matter, who asked not to be identified because the communications were private.

The FIFA corruption investigation, announced in 2015 by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, exposed decades of corruption in international football. It resulted in criminal charges against more than 50 defendants in 20 countries, guilty pleas by more than 30 people and companies, and the trial convictions of three people and one corporation.

21st Century Fox Inc., the parent company of Fox International Channels, was not charged in the bribery scandal and denied any wrongdoing.