Political corruption

SIGNIFICANCE: Political corruption encompasses a wide variety of criminal behaviors by elected and appointed government officials including bribery, extortion, embezzlement, illegal kickbacks, influence peddling, voting fraud, and conflicts of interest. A common denominator among all these offenses is the illicit procurement of political influence with wealth. Unscrupulous wrongdoing by public officials erodes the foundations of a liberal democracy, undermines the healthy functioning of a market economy, and hampers the development of a vibrant civic society.

Although political corruption is often a consensual and ostensibly victimless crime in its appearance, it is one of the most socially harmful activities in a society, especially a democracy. It contributes to alienating citizens from political processes that are hijacked by well-connected interests. Arbitrariness and cronyism weaken the rule of law and ultimately diminish the legitimacy of the state through perversion of the democratic ideals of inclusion, equality, and participation.

Economically, political corruption contributes to the squandering of taxpayer money and generates economic inefficiencies. It causes businesses to waste time with government bureaucrats negotiating licenses, permits, and signatures. It can cause governments to engage in the wrong kinds of projects and contracts and to overspend on projects that are basically sound. It fosters a lack of openness and competition that leads to misallocations of resources to the general detriment of the citizenry. All the while, it fosters public cynicism and mutual distrust between government officials and the public, deepens socioeconomic inequalities, and facilitates the emergence of organized crime.

Political Corruption in History

Corruption has been an integral part of American political life since at least the end of the Civil War in the mid-1860s. The rapid postwar growth of New York City and the massive influx of new immigrants fostered political corruption in the nation’s largest city on an unprecedented scale. Leaders of the city’s Tammany Hall—the political machine of the Democratic Party—won elections by soliciting bribes from real state developers, placing political cronies on the city’s payroll, and using dishonest judges to speed the naturalization of immigrants in return for the promise of their votes. Tammany Hall’s leader, “Boss” William Marcy Tweed, was expelled after The New York Times exposed the graft dealings of the ring based on the information provided by a county bookkeeper. However, although quick and effective legal action convicted Tweed of embezzlement and sentenced him to twelve years of incarceration, urban corruption survived.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the journalist Lincoln Steffens published a series of sensational exposés of corruption in major American cities and revealed that instead of new immigrants and the poor, the business establishment was the real source of political corruption. Steffens initiated a new era of so-called “muckraking” investigative journalism that raised civic consciousness and motivated public reform.

In response to the public outcry that responded to Steffens’s exposés, changes were implemented at all levels of government to ensure greater accountability and transparency. Many local governments replaced corrupt urban political machines with professional city managers, commissioners, and more efficient system of municipal administration that were accountable to city councils. State laws mandating elections by secret ballot, popular initiatives, referendum, recall votes, and direct primary elections were enacted to weaken the influence of party bosses. At the federal level, the Seventeenth Amendment (1913) and Nineteenth Amendment (1920) to the Constitution institutionalized the direct election of US senators and granted suffrage to women in national elections—both changes that allowed the people to play more direct roles in political processes.

However important those Progressive reforms were, they made only a minor dent in corrupt machine politics. The survival of urban corruption through the 1920s and 1930s was in part reinforced by the Eighteenth Amendment’s (1919) national prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Prohibition encouraged organized crime and political corruption to flourish, as public demand for illegal liquor soared. Pernicious crime syndicates corrupted local law-enforcement agencies, government officials, and judges. Eventually, public disgust, aroused by a report by the Wickersham Commission in 1931, as well as municipal investigations led to a fierce crackdown on urban corruption. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, surviving organized crime leaders turned to labor racketeering, gambling, and drug dealings for profits.

After World War II, congressional committees began to investigate the extent to which criminal organizations and labor rackets had penetrated into local governments. The preferred method of government infiltration was to support friendly politicians through campaign contributions. Organized crime groups utilized their political capital to influence land-use decisions, purchase kickbacks, exploit social benefit programs, and embezzle government funds. The cozy relations between the underworld and political clans in local politics would later be replicated at the national level, between corporate interests and political parties. Without radical reforms, the American democracy was in danger of being shaped by private wealth rather than by ordinary people.

Public repugnance for political corruption reached a new height during the second presidency of Richard M. Nixon. In 1971, Nixon commuted the sentence for racketeering of the notorious union figure Jimmy Hoffa. Later, he was rewarded by becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to be endorsed by a major union, Hoffa’s own mob-ridden Teamsters Union. In June 1972, the police arrested burglars from Nixon’s reelection campaign as they attempted to wire the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel. During the congressional investigation of the ensuing Watergate scandal, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned because of unrelated criminal charges of tax evasion and bribery during his earlier tenure as governor of Maryland. Nixon himself resigned in 1974 for his role in the Watergate scandal and its cover-up.

By the mid-1970s, as America celebrated its bicentennial, it was evident that democratic elections were not a sufficient or necessary cure for political corruption. Electoral systems are extremely vulnerable to special interest influence. The right to contribute to electoral campaigns, although protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, has since become a key agenda-setting mechanism for powerful entities with vested interests in local, national, and international issues, including gun control, energy, telecommunications, banking regulation, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, among others.

Although the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 implemented the most sweeping changes of the campaign finance system in recent history, political elections remained infested with attempts to conceal the origins of campaign contributions and to evade contribution and spending limits that incorporate a variety of money-laundering techniques. These techniques include the use of shell companies, straw donors, and the funneling of money through political action committees, unions, and nonprofit organizations. The blatant sale of political access, such as the infusion of foreign money into the Republican and Democratic National Committees and the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996, demands more creativity and resolve in the stamping out of complex networks of patron-client relationships in American politics.

The 2016 US presidential election, which saw Republican candidate Donald Trump elected, drew new attention to corruption issues. Both Trump and Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's campaigns were accused of various forms of corruption in the media. While some of these allegations—such as Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud—were relatively baseless, likely stemming from the hyperpartisan political atmosphere of the time, others raised serious concerns. For example, the US intelligence community determined that Russia had undertaken a campaign to influence the election in favor of Trump, though the extent of the effort was unclear. A series of government investigations sought to uncover whether Trump or members of his campaign colluded with Russia in the matter. By the time the investigations headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded in 2019, Mueller and his team had indicted, convicted, or gotten guilty pleas on various criminal charges from thirty-four people and three companies with connections to Trump. However, Mueller did not charge anyone on the Trump campaign with working with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. The Mueller Report did list ten instances in which Trump may have obstructed justice, but did not make a clear determination regarding Trump's guilt or innocence: "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Trump also drew criticism for notable potential conflicts of interest within his administration. Much of this criticism revolved around Trump's own business interests and those of his family. Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub resigned his post in protest over the administration's questionable actions. Additionally, many Trump cabinet members and other appointees were widely seen as having potential conflicts of interest. For example, Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was forced to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian election meddling due to his own failure to report his contacts with Russians.

In August 2019, an anonymous US intelligence officer issued a whistleblower complaint to the chairs of congressional intelligence committees regarding a July 25, 2019, phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Trump's potential 2020 presidential rival and former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in exchange for the release of military assistance to Ukraine that had already been approved by Congress. Trump also asked Zelensky to investigate a 2016 US election conspiracy theory and a Democratic National Committee server that was allegedly located in Ukraine. Trump subsequently denied that there was any quid pro quo regarding the military aid. The complaint prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into whether Trump's actions on the Ukraine phone call were impeachable offenses.

On October 17, 2019, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen the Trump National Doral resort in South Florida as the venue for the 2020 Group of Seven (G-7) summit. Although acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to assure reporters that Trump would not profit from hosting the summit at his resort and that the venue would be less expensive than other options, critics decried the choice as blatant corruption, noting that the resort had been underperforming financially. After backlash from across the political spectrum, Trump announced that the summit would not be held at his resort.

During his campaign for the 2024 presidential race, Trump was convicted of and charged with other crimes. On May 30, 2024, he became the first US president to become a convicted felon. After a trial, he was found guilty of thirty-four felonies related to what became known as the "hush money case." According to the jury, Trump falsified business records in connection with a payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with him. Buying her silence avoided a scandal in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Trump was also found guilty in civil cases. On February 16, 2024, a judge ruled that he lied about his wealth to obtain more favorable rates from lenders. He was ordered to pay a $454 million fine. When he was unable to get a bond for such a large amount of money, the judge accepted a $175 million bond while Trump appealed the verdict. On May 9, 2023, a jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Carroll was awarded a $5 million judgment.

As of mid-2024, Trump faced additional charges related to election interferece to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. He also faced charges for retaining highly sensitive national security information for keeping thirty-two documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Prevalence and Causes

The most complete statistics on political corruption in the United States are collected by the Public Integrity Section of the US Department of Justice, which investigates and prosecutes elected and appointed officials at all levels of government who are accused of public corruption, ballot fraud, campaign-financing offenses, and criminal conflicts of interest. The Justice Department reports only federal actions, but up to 80 percent of corruption prosecutions are brought against federal officials.

Annual rates of indictment were higher during the Obama and Trump administrations than during the Biden administration. During 2023, the federal government reported 334 corruption convictions, a 2.5 percent increase over the previous year. Eighty convictions, the largest number, were of local government officials for official corruption offenses. Forty-one convictions were of state officials and forty-four were for official corruption regarding federal law enforcement officials. Other cases were for official corruption for federal procurement and in federal programs. The remaining cases were grouped under "other."

According to Best Life's 2024 assessment, the top ten most corrupt states were New York, California, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, Louisiana, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, and Kentucky. Another way of evaluating the problem of political corruption is to ask how members of the public experience corruption in their daily lives. Every year, Transparency International (TI), a nongovernment organization at the forefront of combating global corruption, surveys corporate executives and business analysts around the world about their perceptions of government corruption and ranks countries according to the obtained indices. In TI's 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index rating, the United States earned a 69 on a scale from 0 (most corrupt) to 100 (least corrupt), ranking twenty-fourth out of 180 countries.

Political corruption is a behavior motivated by rational calculations of expected utility. Opportunities for corruption emerge when high payoffs are expected and little risk of being physically detected, socially stigmatized, or legally punished exists. Opportunities are structured by the convergence of three key determinants:

•motivated offenders, such as low-paid public officials, businesses seeking lucrative contracts, and politicians building larger power bases

•risky governmental policies or practices, such as non-bid contracts, excessive bureaucratic red tape, and nonsecret balloting

•absence of effective institutional guardians to monitor and punish offenders, such as intra-agency audits, independent judiciaries, and courageous investigative journalists

Investigation, Prosecution, and Punishment

Legal proscriptions against corruption fall into two main categories: those that specify that anyone engaging in corruption meet with some sort of penal sanction, and those that provide for impeachment, removal from office, and permanent exclusion from holding elective offices.

Investigations of allegations of political corruption can be initiated by independent anticorruption agencies, administrative audit bodies, or judicial-prosecutorial authorities. An example of standing anticorruption agencies is the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, which is a fact-finding agency required by law to identify and investigate organized crime, corruption and waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayers’ money. Findings from its inquiries are made public through written reports and public hearings.

Sometimes, independent investigation can be initiated in response to particular scandals, such as the administration of special counsel by the Justice Department. Many government agencies have established their own offices of inspector general for financial, compliance, performance, and ethical audits. The success of either independent anticorruption commissions or offices of inspector general hinges on adequate funding, operational independence, and the ability to trigger formal investigation by judicial-prosecutorial authorities.

Political corruption has often been immune from prosecution because of the offenders have power and connections. In cases of successful prosecution, investigators have relied on investigative techniques usually used for white-collar crime and organized crime, including undercover operations (where fictitious companies are set up and agents pose as crooked businessmen), informants, surveillance, immunity against prosecution for cooperation, and witness protection programs.

The first step in grand jury investigation of unlawfully derived wealth is to examine defendants’ income tax returns and banking information. Financial evidence is critical in securing convictions and may include failure to disclose a specific item of income, net worth, expenditures, bank deposits, lack of loans or checks to cash, unusual use of cash, lack of credit charges, safe deposit box activity, or use of third parties in financial transactions.

An instructive and controversial example of effective investigation and prosecution of corruption is the Abscam scandal resulting from a sting operation begun in 1978 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI created a front organized called “Abdul Enterprises, Ltd.” (hence, Abscam). Its undercover agents posed as associates of a Middle Eastern sheik and offered selected members of Congress money in exchange for helping the sheik to obtain asylum in the United States, participating in an investment venture, and assisting the ring to transfer money out of its home country. Videotaped meetings of the FBI agents and the congressmen involved in the scheme led to the indictments and convictions of one senator and four congressmen on charges of bribery and conspiracy in separate trials. Another congressman was convicted on lesser charges. All but one of the politicians resigned from office to avoid impeachment and expulsion. The FBI’s actions raised questions about entrapment and prompted the establishment of two congressional committees to investigate the allegations. Although no wrongdoing by the FBI was found, the conviction of Florida congressman Richard Kelly was later overturned.

The punishment of persons convicted of political corruption is not harsh compared to that of traditional street offenders in the United States. In fiscal year 2021, there were 156 convicted federal bribery offenders, a decrease of 28.4 percent from 2017. Of these, about 73 percent were incarcerated. The average length of prison time served by incarcerated federal bribery offenders was twenty-threen months.

Bibliography

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"Corruption Perception Index." Transparency International, 30 Jan. 2024, www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023. Accessed 7 June 2024.

Grossman, Mark. Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power, and Greed. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003. Print.

O'Kruk, Amy and Curt Merrill. "Donald Trump's Criminal Cases in One Place." CNN Politics, 2 July 2024, www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/07/politics/trump-indictments-criminal-cases/. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Prosecution of Public Corruption Cases. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1988.

"Public Integrity Section." United States Department of Justice, www.justice.gov/criminal/pin. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Report to Congress on the Activities and Operations of the Public Integrity Section for 2002. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 2003.

Qiu, Yue, Chris Zubak-Skees, and Erik Lincoln. "Grades for All 50 States on Corruption." USA Today. Gannett, 9 Nov. 2015. Web. 2 June 2016.

Rose-Ackerman, Susan. Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.