Wall Street Pushes Back on Foreign Bribery Probe

Wall Street banks are embroiled in an intense dispute with the U.S. government over its “aggressive” interpretation of foreign-bribery laws, a flurry of legal wrangling in a probe with broad implications for how corporations do business overseas, according to people familiar with the matter.

The previously unreported campaign by banks goes to the heart of a wide-ranging inquiry into whether they ran afoul of U.S. antibribery laws by giving jobs to relatives of managers of state-owned companies and other well-connected officials, including the kin of high-ranking Chinese government officials known...