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The writer is author of ‘Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World’
Two developments this week have taken a sledgehammer to the US’s supposed leadership role as an anti-corruption crusader.
The first came from President Donald Trump himself, who on Monday used an executive order to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA is a simple piece of legislation that makes it illegal for Americans to bribe foreign officials. On the books since 1977, the legislation was not only the first in the world that criminalised this kind of bribery, but has long served as the lodestar for anti-corruption efforts elsewhere.
The FCPA not only banned Americans from greasing the palms of crooked foreign officials, but provided further defences for American companies looking to stave off greedy foreign politicians. As the FT’s Alan Beattie has written, the legislation helped “level the global playing field for US businesses”.
For Trump, though, the law was a “horror show for America”. And thanks to his executive order, the legislation is now in effect dead.
If that were the president’s only move, it would have been devastating enough. But somehow, things got even worse. Trump’s pliant Department of Justice issued an order for federal prosecutors to drop a landmark case against sitting New York mayor Eric Adams, who stood accused of, among other things, significant bribery and corruption-related charges. Adams has denied all charges.
While much of the attention of Adams’s case focused on trivialities like airline upgrades, it was always about something far more destabilising. He stood accused of both soliciting and “knowingly” accepting funding from foreign nationals — which is, as every American politician knows, the reddest of red lines when it comes to campaign finance regulations. It was a bombshell prosecution, with allegations that Adams at one point even directed a member of his staff to obtain illegal funds from a foreign source.
The case, first filed in September, was a shot across the bows for all US politicians who toyed with the idea of looking for foreign sources of campaign funding. Given how lax American campaign financing regulations are, there has long been clear concern about foreign actors taking advantage. As long ago as 2010, then president Barack Obama was warning about American elections being “bankrolled by . . . foreign entities”. Elections, Obama said, “should be decided by the American people”.
So much for all that. With the Trump administration moving to drop all charges against Adams, the signal has been sent, and the floodgates are now open to foreign regimes ready to ply American politicians with as much money as they want. So long as those politicians remain in Trump’s good graces, there’s little reason to think they will be prosecuted.
Moreover, every one of those paid-off politicians will now do what they can to keep Trump in power, knowing that he’s the only way to assure a compliant Department of Justice. Suddenly, the spigots of foreign funding to American campaigns are open.
It is all more than anti-corruption advocates — those who have helped the US build out its anti-corruption playbook over decades — can stomach. Combined with the recent dissolution of all kleptocracy-related ventures run out of the Department of Justice, it’s clear that Trump and his allies are more than happy to wreck America’s anti-corruption bona fides.
It is small comfort that much of this is, at its core, unsurprising. Trump has long railed against the FCPA, and was himself the subject of high-profile investigations into whether foreign forces and foreign funding aided his campaigns.
Adams, meanwhile, has notoriously inveigled himself into Trump’s orbit in recent months, apparently with the intention of getting the charges dropped.
Absent an act of Congress, legislation like the FCPA will at least remain on the books, alongside other corruption-related regulations — all of which future presidential administrations could once more enforce. But those are the barest of silver linings. It is clear that Trump entered his second administration unafraid to allow America’s legacy of anti-corruption leadership to implode, and to undo decades of progress made by anti-corruption crusaders.
The real “horror show” is the new administration’s approach to corruption, which will open the doors of America to all manner of bad actors.
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