Days before the inauguration, then-President-elect Trump engaged in perhaps the most transparent grift of his entire career—the launching of a meme coin under the moniker $Trump. The result? In weeks, investors in the coin lost $2 billion, while the Trump family added hundreds of millions, possibly billions, in personal wealth. Yet while the “investors”—including foreign individuals, entities, and perhaps even governments—lost money, might their intended, indirect return on investment be both substantial and at the expense of the American people? To ask the question is to answer it.
Within one day of her confirmation, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo directing the Department of Justice to shift away from prior corporate enforcement priorities such as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) and Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) prosecutions against corporations and lobbyists. Days later, that memo was complemented by an Executive Order pausing all new FCPA investigations for 180 days. Rolling out a red carpet for corrupt foreign influencers would be no less inviting.
Pausing FCPA enforcement is entirely consistent with the domestic erosion of America’s anti-corruption laws. Make no mistake: it is high time for individuals and entities—both foreign and domestic—to seek improper influence with public officials. A president who thinks in purely transactional terms, surrounded by law enforcement and senior leadership chosen specifically because they will do his bidding, plus the neutering of bribery and corruption laws. What could possibly go wrong?
The central federal bribery statute makes it illegal for a U.S. official to accept anything of value in exchange for “influence in the performance of any official act.” That statute was tested when Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was convicted on 11 corruption-related felony counts in 2014, including “honest services” fraud, extortion, and conspiracy, and in which the tawdry facts included $175,000 worth of loans, gifts, vacations, shopping sprees, Rolex watches, and a loaned Ferrari, all from an individual promoting a tobacco-based dietary supplement. McDonnell and his wife, in return, took several specific actions, including hosting events, arranging meetings between the businessman and state officials, and touting the supplement to state universities and his senior advisors.
Still, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the federal bribery statute’s definition of an “official act” does not include “arranging a meeting, contacting another public official, or hosting an event” without the presence of something “more.” Rather, the Court found that an “official act” must involve a formal exercise of governmental power on something specific pending before a public official. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the decision, Fred Wertheimer, a veteran government integrity expert, correctly predicted that the Court “disarmed the ability of the American people to prevent similar kinds of corrupt practices in the future.” Now, a decade later, the facts in McDonnell seem almost quaint.
In the decade since McDonnell, the Supreme Court has effectively made a mission of overturning public bribery and honest services convictions. To wit, the Court threw out the fraud convictions of New Jersey Rep. William Barone Jr., and Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Chief of Staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, for their roles in the “Bridgegate” conspiracy, holding, ominously, “not every corrupt act is a federal crime,” and that, because, according to the Court, the defendants’ aim was not to receive “money or property of the Port Authority,” the statute did not cover their conduct.
Keeping with the pattern, in 2023, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the jury instructions in the corruption trial of former Executive Deputy Secretary for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Joseph Percoco, were too unclear. During an eight-month resignation from state government service to run the governor’s re-election campaign in 2014, Percoco accepted payments to secure construction bids for the Governor’s Buffalo Billion initiative—an initiative to invest a billion dollars of taxpayer money into Buffalo.
In 2024, the rulings got more local—and more loco—in Snyder v. United States. James Snyder, who was then the Mayor of Portage, Indiana, received $13,000 from a truck company that, not so coincidentally, received contracts totaling over $1 million for new trash trucks for the city. The Supreme Court held that while it is a crime for state and local officials to “corruptly” solicit, accept, or agree to accept bribes before the official act, “gratuities” made after the official action are outside the scope. Would-be influencers can, ahem, easily drive a truck through the loophole of that distinction.
In sum, a decade of Supreme Court decisions makes it significantly more difficult to achieve, much less sustain, federal bribery convictions. Decimated statutory and judicial anti-corruption guardrails presented an almost perfect storm for President Trump and Elon Musk. But what of those pesky internal watchdogs known as Inspectors General?
In the aftermath of Watergate, Congress created the first inspector general position in 1976. Two years later, it passed the Inspector General Act of 1978. Political scientist Austin Sarat notes that IGs “play an important role in blowing the whistle on instances of gross inefficiencies or unlawful behavior and by not being the servants of any political party.” If rooting out fraud, abuse, corruption, inefficiency, and improper influence were the actual, as opposed to nominal, goals of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) then IGs would be its natural allies. If, however, DOGE actually represents something more sinister, then firing 18 inspectors general within weeks of taking office complements the erosion of external constraints by removing the internal whistleblowers. Were the motives high-minded or something else? Consider that in addition to the volume of firings—no president other than Donald Trump since 1981 has ever removed more than two IGs—the particular IG’s among those fired include in Rep. Greg Casar’s words, “at least five inspectors general that were looking into Elon Musk’s companies.”
Finally, in what seemed a rather glaring case of public corruption—alleged violations of New York City law in exchange for lavish trips paid for by the Turkish government, along with alleged defrauding of the New York City public campaign finance program—turned out not to be so simple. Instead of the Supreme Court complicating matters, on this occasion, it was the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. More specifically, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed an indefinite pause on the prosecution of Mayor Adams. Bove characterized his request to the court as “straightforward” because the indictment was “interfering with national security and immigration enforcement.”
This, however, is a useful characterization of a more nefarious intent. Several notable, and notably conservative, SDNY prosecutors resigned over the directed dismissal, including Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District, Danielle Sassoon. According to Sassoon’s must-read resignation letter: “Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.”
Too far-fetched to be non-fiction? Just ask recently deputized border czar Tom Homan. In a recent Fox interview, Homan threatened Mayor Adams to keep his “vow,” or Homan would be “up his butt.” Once translated, the message is clear: enforce immigration law as the administration intends or find yourself back under the weighty thumb of an openly vindictive Department of Justice.
In a more rational time, the transfer of millions of meme-coin laundered dollars to political leaders’ personal coffers would be an existential scandal. The same would be true of political leaders extracting policy support in exchange for abandoning unrelated criminal prosecutions. Likewise, for “gratuities” paid to government officials by government contractors. Each individual instance is a serious concern. Yet collectively, even more is at stake. When such patently transactional approaches to the rule of law become standard practice, democracy stands to lose more than individual cases. It stands to lose the cause itself.