Broad daylight

In late spring last year, a Texas grand jury indicted Henry Cuellar, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and his wife, Imelda, on charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the Republic of Azerbaijan and a Mexican commercial bank. A couple of months later, a New York jury convicted Bob Menendez, the former chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, also for accepting bribes— including hundreds of thousands in cash, 13 bars of gold, and a Mercedes-Benz convertible—from Egyptian officials, Qatari officials, and three New Jersey businessmen. “This wasn’t politics as usual,” said Damian Williams, an attorney for the Southern District of New York. “This was politics for profit.” A couple of months later, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, for taking more than $100,000 worth of personal bribes and millions in illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials and companies. How much of this sort of corruption is there in America? 

Ben Freeman is the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of The Foreign Policy Auction. Freeman says these cases are about as exceptional as they are spectacular. Of course, they’re verybad, betraying the public interest while burning public trust. But they’re unusual—not just in that the officials who get involved in them tend to be so remarkably arrogant and incompetent, but in that the criminal conspiracies themselves are so marginal to foreign-influence operations in the United States overall. Every year, foreign interests—many of them autocracies, with priorities starkly at odds with the mores of American democracy—spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these operations, through lobbying and public-relations firms, think tanks and universities, even sports franchises. And it’s all legal. But it can be difficult for most Americans to care about it, because it’s still so difficult to see …

Gustav Jönsson: Why do you think all the high-profile cases of corruption among American politicians over the past year or so seem to involve autocratic governments?