Oct. 07, 2024 |
5 W Main: Foreign Agents. Elected in 2021 promising to fight crime, Eric Adams became this September the first-ever mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. Prosecutors say Adams took luxury travel perks and illicit political contributions from Turkish officials—which he then used to extract some further US$10 million for his mayoral campaign from the city’s coffers via its matching-funds system. Enterprising stuff.
As a news item, “corrupt politician” might seem unremarkable, but Adams is only the most recent, glaring case. The former Democratic senator from New Jersey Bob Menendez chaired the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee until last year, when he was indicted for having conveyed sensitive information to the Egyptian government in exchange for envelopes stuffed with cash.
The incompetency of these recent operations is striking: Adams’s people kept theirs going even when they knew they were being watched. When his Turkish contact instructed him to delete their text messages, he promised he would. Perhaps he had a lot on his mind. After Egyptian officials presented Menendez with several bars of gold, he look up their value on Google—repeatedly.
What may be more striking, though, is where the money is coming from: Turkey and Egypt are both countries dominated by single parties, commanded by long-ruling strongmen, who extract and use their countries’ wealth with impunity—not least to develop influence abroad. What’s the extent of that problem?
Much of the answer, it seems, has little to do with self-exposure to criminal prosecution, Adams- or Menendez-style. As Casey Michel shows in his new book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, there’s a whole legion of lobbyists in Washington working to influence American politics on behalf of kleptocratic states. There’s also no obvious limit of erstwhile congressmen and generals willing to take enormous sums from them, after their time in the government or military, to broker relationships. And that, for the most part, is perfectly legal.
—Gustav Jönsson
