When Robert Mueller was tapped to investigate Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election, white-collar defense attorneys in Washington pumped their fists and readied their invoices. Donald Trump and his inner circle have hit up practically every white-shoe law firm in town: Covington & Burling, Miller & Chevalier, Morgan Lewis, Hogan Lovells, Norton Rose Fulbright. For decades, veteran litigators from these firms have defended everyone from George W. Bush and Jack Abramoff on the right to Bill Clinton and John Edwards on the left. More lawyers might have offered their services if their bank clients had not already been subpoenaed for information related to potential money-laundering charges.

THE CHICKENSHIT CLUB: WHY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FAILS TO PROSECUTE EXECUTIVES by Jesse Eisinger Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $28.00

The initial attorneys for Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, two of the Trump insiders most implicated in the scandal, came from WilmerHale, the same firm that Mueller left to become special counsel. Trump’s hires—Ty Cobb and John Dowd—have known Mueller for years. Despite rumors that Trump would fire Mueller, Cobb and Dowd have praised the special counsel’s honesty and professionalism. Rather than act as adversaries to prosecutors, defense lawyers have presented themselves as members of the same team, eager to cooperate with the investigation. “We’ve been helpful to him,” Dowd said of Mueller, “and he’s been straight with us.” Kushner’s lawyers, for their part, were the ones who provided prosecutors with the notorious emails about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer and a lobbyist. According to USA Today, Trump’s lawyers have even passed messages of “appreciation and greetings” from the president to Mueller.

This is part of a familiar dance between government lawyers and their colleagues in the defense bar. Far from being entrenched opponents, prosecutors and defense attorneys are often colleagues who have spent years working together in the same white-shoe firms—and who fully expect to do so again in the future. The coziness, in fact, goes a long way toward explaining why the government has failed to indict and prosecute corporate criminals at the highest level. According to a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, federal prosecutions for corporate crime plunged by 29 percent between 2004 and 2014—a time that saw a massive housing bubble and collapse built on unconscionable fraud.

How did this happen? Close relationships on both sides of the negotiating table create not only a disinclination to play hardball but also career incentives for leniency. Add to this legal rulings over the past decade that have effectively placed handcuffs on prosecutors, and it’s easy to see why no major bank executive saw the inside of a jail cell after the financial crisis. But the biggest constraint on indicting corporate criminals lies in the minds of the men and women of the Justice Department.

Jesse Eisinger’s terrific book, The Chickenshit Club, explains how we got here: how prosecutors lost their tools and, more importantly, their nerve. While Eisinger focuses mostly on the missteps of law enforcement agencies under Bush and Obama, it’s a sobering read for anyone eagerly anticipating the demise of the Trump cartel. In recent history, America has dealt with grifters like Trump with kid gloves. In fact, that’s part of the reason he’s in the White House today.