Local corruption from coast to coast, Part 2
Former Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted (R) is sworn in as Senator for Ohio by Vice President JD Vance, January 2025. Husted was Lt. Gov during passage of Ohio House Bill 6, the legislation at the core of the FirstEnergy scandal covered below. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT
Read enough about public corruption in America at the state and local level, and it becomes clear that both parties have plenty of corruption. But the patterns — what types of officials, in what positions, get involved in corruption — differ. In our Feature, we complete our two-part survey of corruption in America, looking at foreign-linked “strategic corruption”, corruption in the GOP, and a certain type of public office that seems to attract a lot of lawbreaking. In What We’re Following, we look at recent pieces showing why the concept of patrimonialism is a useful framework for understanding Trump’s America — and authoritarian kleptocracy in general. Then we take a look at the cottage industry in lobbying for pardons that has sprung up in DC and cover highlights in the fight against local corruption across America.
FEATURE
LOCAL CORRUPTION FROM COAST TO COAST, PART 2
If there’s one big idea we have at The Dekleptocracy Project it’s that to prevent a patrimonial authoritarian kleptocracy from taking control of America, grassroots activists, local journalists, and officials at the state and local level who are still committed to the rule of law should work together to crack down on local corruption. In our previous Kleptocracy in America report, we introduced some of the findings from our research on local corruption since the beginning of 2024, exploring what we termed “minor corruption” and then looking at recent cases involving Democratic officials. In this issue, we’re going to flip the lens: from minor corruption to the grandest corruption of all – strategic corruption, involving foreign powers – and from the Dems to the GOP. At the end of the day, there’s simply not enough data to say one party or the other is more corrupt. What does seem clear is that – while there’s plenty of overlap – there are different patterns of corruption based on the differing demographic makeup of their bases. Beyond party lines, structural features seem to make certain offices highly susceptible to corruption. This is all vital knowledge for anti-corruption activists and officials to understand as they develop strategies for the fight against American kleptocracy.
First, let’s talk about a topic near and dear to our hearts: strategic corruption. DKP’s President, Tofer Harrison, literally wrote the book (well, co-wrote the article, anyway) on the concept, and DKP was originally formed to research and advocate for policies to counter it. Our sister publication, Dekleptocracy Report, is focused on the topic. So what is it? Simply put, strategic corruption is the instrumentalization of corruption as a tool of international statecraft , especially by authoritarian powers. It’s a potent tool because it can be used to weaken rivals by undermining the rule of law, influence foreign leaders, and most of all, build wealth and power. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the global leader in strategic corruption. The extension of Moscow-linked kleptocratic networks throughout its near abroad and into Europe (and, to a lesser extent, North America) is arguably a tool more fundamental to his efforts to exert power than military aggression or information warfare. These efforts range from parking dirty money in foreign financial markets and real estate, to cutting corrupt deals to evade sanctions, to colluding with corrupt westerners for mutual political gain, to attempting outright domination of neighboring post-Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia through corrupt proxies. Indeed, Ukrainian spoilage of Putin’s attempts to incorporate Ukraine into his transnational kleptocratic networks – exercised through vassals like Viktor Yanukovych, up to 2014, and Viktor Medvedchuk, until 2021 – were among the primary triggers of his decisions to resort to military force in 2014 and again in 2022.
However, the cases of (alleged) strategic corruption in America that hit the news in 2024 show that strategic corruption doesn’t just stem from Russia. Likewise, they show it’s not just a problem for K Street. Perhaps the most notorious American corruption case in the past year – the federal indictment of Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams – is centered on alleged bribes by Turkish agents to, among other things, override a safety certification to speed the opening of a new consular building. The case of former Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, involving Egyptian attempts to influence defense spending through alleged bribery that resulted in the Senator’s conviction last year and recent sentencing, is another example of an authoritarian ally engaging in strategic corruption. Then there is the Chinese variant. This includes cases of alleged bribery that look like more or less simple espionage, as well as the scandal that rocked New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration last year, which resulted in the indictment of a former aide for allegedly using her position to influence the administration in ways favorable to the Chinese government in return for bribes from Beijing. And as detailed in New York Times reporting last year, California is wracked by a substantial corruption problem owing to, um, single-party rule and the death of local media – and the influx of massive amounts of Chinese wealth into the Los Angeles real estate market. Wealthy Chinese have sought to influence local officials, such as Los Angeles City Council member Jose Huizar. He was convicted last year for allegedly accepting bribes from a billionaire investor. While, unlike Russia, investment of Chinese private wealth in the US is not necessarily a direct extension of the regime’s power, it is nonetheless a concern for rule of law. Even North Korea has dabbled in a bit of strategic corruption in the US. Last spring, Wyoming shut down several firms that had allegedly been established by North Korean agents, taking advantage of the state’s loose regulatory environment to raise money for weapons programs, including through money laundering and identity theft.
Something rotten in the statehouse: GOP corruption
Strategic corruption is clearly an important problem, even at the local level. It’s also notable that these strategic corruption cases primarily involved Democratic officials. This may simply be because Democrats control two of the richest states and most of the big cities, the most attractive targets for foreign corruption. However, most corruption in America is of the homegrown variety, and the GOP has a culture of corruption rivaling the Democrats, even without taking Trump into account. Recent corruption cases involving current and former Republican officials are widespread. One of the most important is the case of former Portage, Indiana Mayor James Snyder. He was convicted on federal charges in 2021 for accepting a $13,000 “gratuity” from a trucking company after awarding it a major city contract. Yet, in a landmark ruling last June, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction, in a decision widely regarded as effectively legalizing bribery (Snyder continues to face federal charges).
However, this was far from the only case involving alleged GOP corruption to hit the news, and while it might have been the most important due to its legal ramifications, it’s far from the biggest in terms of the sums involved. That dubious award likely goes to Ohio’s long-running FirstEnergy case. It is the state’s biggest-ever corruption scandal, and likely the biggest recent scandal in American politics that you’ve never heard of. Two executives of energy utility FirstEnergy were recently indicted in federal court for allegedly running a $60 million bribery scheme between 2017 and 2020 in an effort to streamline the passage of a bill that provided a more than $1 billion subsidy to the company. The “dark money” went to a 501(c)(4) controlled by then-House Speaker Larry Householder, who was convicted on federal charges for his role in the scheme and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2023. Unsurprisingly, he is reportedly lobbying Trump for a pardon. Several state charges are still pending, and two individuals involved in the case have committed suicide. Notably, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and then-Lt. Gov. John Husted – who recently ascended to take J.D. Vance’s vacant Senate seat – were involved in lobbying to get the bill passed, including direct communication with FirstEnergy executives. Neither has been charged with any crime. Householder is not the only GOP Speaker to end up in hot water recently. Former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada is set to go on trial in April for his alleged role in a 2019 kickback scheme, and former Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield is facing charges of embezzlement from nonprofits he ran. Moving from the state to the local level, Las Vegas Justice of the Peace and former City Council member Michele Fiore faced – and was convicted of – embezzlement charges, after allegedly stealing funds raised for a slain police officer’s memorial and using them to pay for plastic surgery and her daughter’s wedding.
Ironically for a party that has made “election integrity” an important part of its narrative, there have been several cases of GOP party officials or candidates allegedly involved in election-related corruption. Former Utah AG candidate Frank Mylar was charged in July by state officials for allegedly bribing a rival with a job offer if he dropped out of the race. Former Arizona GOP chair Jeff DeWit resigned last January after a tape surfaced on which he appeared to attempt to bribe Senate candidate Kari Lake to drop out of the race (he has not been charged with any crime). GOP officials have also pursued charges of election fraud that appear politically motivated – which has sometimes rebounded on them. For instance, Virginia AG Jason Miyares – who has built something of a brand on using his office to fight culture war battles – pursued criminal charges against a county registrar following the 2020 election until dropping them in January of last year. He’s now facing a lawsuit for malicious prosecution.
Above the law: corrupt sheriffs
While state house speakers are likely to be corruption magnets regardless of party due to the critical position they hold in shepherding bills through the legislature (see: Michael Madigan, and the case of Sheryl Williams Stapleton, below), one institution stands out for anyone studying patterns of corruption in the GOP and America writ large: sheriffs. There are over 3,000 sheriffs in the US. While statistics regarding party loyalty are not available, they are disproportionately right-wing. While the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA), for instance, does not endorse candidates, many individual sheriffs endorsed Trump, and the NSA has shown support for many of the administration’s initiatives, endorsing his law enforcement-related cabinet picks – including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard. And while it’s hard to say exactly how frequently sheriffs abuse the office, and most are no doubt law-abiding individuals, it certainly seems that they end up in the news a lot for corruption.
To be fair, it’s not just GOP lawmen that break the law. Democratic South Carolina Sheriff Stephen Gardner was just indicted Wednesday on state public corruption charges, Kentucky Sheriff Ramon Pineiroa was charged earlier this month for allegedly selling vehicles being held as evidence, and Mississippi Sheriff Marshand Crisler was sentenced last month following a conviction on federal bribery charges. But there have been many cases of corruption investigations into and convictions of GOP sheriffs. There’s former Culpeper County, Virginia Sheriff Scott Jenkins, who was convicted in December for an alleged $75,000 “bribes-for-badges” scheme when a jury didn’t buy his defense that his sale of deputy’s badges for cash was a political statement about gun rights, rather than simple graft. Then there was former Clark County, Indiana Sheriff Jamie Noel, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in October for allegedly diverting millions of dollars from a volunteer firefighters’ association he chaired for “travel, gifts, automobiles” and an aircraft. The charges to which former Pittsburg County, Oklahoma Sheriff Chris Morris pleaded guilty in January in a case involving the personal purchase of a UTV from a local dealership which he allegedly then turned in for another model before buying back the first one – with sheriff’s department funds. Lee County, Florida Sheriff Carmine Marceno hasn’t faced charges, but he is reportedly under federal investigation for alleged misuse of funds and has faced calls to resign. More troubling is the case of the long-running federal investigation of Columbus County, North Carolina Sheriff’s Office under former Sheriff Jody Greene, who ran the office for years before resigning (for the second time) in 2023 and recently settled a case with a former inmate. As local journalists reported last year, Greene and other individuals who worked for or did business with the sheriff’s office were at the target of a sprawling, years-long investigation. The investigation of numerous individuals and local small businesses connected with the department suggest the possibility of a major case of local corruption. However, no charges have yet been filed, and with the resignation of the Biden-era US Attorney in charge of the investigation it seems unlikely they ever will be.
What the number of above cases from both parties suggest is that sheriffs are likely to be particularly susceptible to corruption for several reasons. Like police departments, sheriffs have law enforcement powers, but as an independent elected office at the county level, they usually have little oversight – and plenty of funds to play with. They tend to be deeply rooted in their communities, have lots of local connections with the local gentry, and – as partisan elected officials – are connected to the proverbial sausage-making of party politics. Finally, they often face little electoral competition – sheriffs frequently stay in office for decades, which, combined with the fact that they usually have broad powers to hire and fire staff, allows them to build personal fiefdoms based on patronage. All of this is a recipe for potential corruption, a fact born out by a 2019 investigation by the South Carolina Post and Courier which found that sheriffs in 11 of the state’s 46 counties had been charged with criminal violations. More broadly, county offices are likely a good place to look if you want to find self-dealing. They are lower-profile than either the town or city level below them, or the state and federal level above them, but often command substantial budgets. Delving further into these issues – and the related broader topic of law enforcement corruption – will have to wait for another edition of the Kleptocracy in America report, but at the end of the day, if you’re looking for corruption, you could do worse than starting at the speaker’s podium and the sheriff’s office.
WHAT WE’RE FOLLOWING
What we’re reading
There have been plenty of op-eds about the prospects for systemic corruption under Trump, but few lay out the case so well as a recent piece in the online legal journal Verdict, titled “Bribery Enters its Golden Age” by Hofstra University law professor James Sample. Sample lays out a succinct summary of how a series of Supreme Court decisions over the last decade or so have consistently narrowed legal definitions of bribery and corruption, setting the stage for, well, a golden age of bribery, exemplified by Trump’s $TRUMP meme-coin release. He argues the administration’s efforts since inauguration – such as using the Justice Department to cut quid pro quos, stripping away regulatory capacity with DOGE, and firing inspectors general (including those looking into Elon Musk’s companies), are accelerating the situation, creating an acute threat to democracy.
We noted an Atlantic piece in the last issue about how the concept of patrimonialism provides a good framework for the Trump administration, and several other recent pieces run with that ball. Two pieces on Francis Fukuyama’s Substack, Persuasion – this one, by Professors Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, and this companion piece, by Fukuyama himself – delve deeper into the topic, describing how patrimonial systems work, providing historical context, and showing how the Trump admin fits the mold. These pieces emphasize how today’s kleptocracies – patrimonial systems – are less like the totalitarian states of mid century (which were genuinely motivated by ideology) than like pre-Enlightenment polities, which were almost universally structured for the private benefit of an extractive elite (a point we made previously). Again, this is why we like to refer to Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America as “feudal”, although “patrimonial” is admittedly a more accurate word, that, if less evocative, is also less likely to invite the ire of angry medievalists.
A recent post by Professor Dan Nexon on the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog expands on the foreign policy implications of all this. Trump’s affinity for Putin has often been speculatively explained as due to kompromat, reverence, or personal affection, none of which seem plausible for an individual as shameless, egotistical, and narcissistic as Trump. The piece suggests a simpler explanation: both rulers have a shared interest in gutting the rule of law not only at home, but abroad, to further the interests of their “kleptocratic elite-pact”. In this light, any supposed Trumpian grand strategy or theory of global politics that frames his approach in terms of national interests – in particular, the framework of great power competition (GPC) that emerged during the first Trump term – is exposed as a sham, a post-hoc attempt by the “adults in the room” to shoehorn the impulses of a would-be king into a traditional national security framework.
We’d contest that the concept of GPC, for all its faults, was not without merit before January 20, 2025. However, Trump represents not just regime change at home, but globally: the end of the entire post-war rules-based international order and even perhaps the much older Westphalian system. The replacement – here’s that patrimonial framework, again – will likely be something that looks less like the world of the 1930s or even the 1800s than like a high-tech version of early modern Europe. Borders will be negotiable, land will be not sovereign territory but real estate to by traded for profit or seized by force, and common people will be not citizens but mere tenants at the whim of an exploitative global ruling aristocracy who – for all their mutual hatreds, rivalries and ambitions – will have a shared interest in the subjugation of the nations they severally rule.
DC Throughline
There’s always plenty to report on from DC these days. But one bit of reporting we’d like to emphasize is this NYT piece on how Trump allies convicted of crimes – many of them on corruption charges – are seeking pardons from the White House. Pardons are traditionally based on merit-based recommendations from the US pardon attorney’s office (with the odd political ally or kinsman thrown into the mix). However, this administration has shifted the process to the White House Counsel’s Office, and created a system for processing supplicants’ requests for clemency.
As the NYT reports, a whole cottage industry of “lawyers and lobbyists” with connections to the administration has sprung up to handle demand from everyone ranging from conservative reality TV stars, to killer cops, to Sam Bankman-Fried, to – reportedly – Mike Madigan. It’s a telling example of the patrimonialism we’ve been talking about here and of the protection-racket transactionalism of kleptocracy. Additionally, there’s talk that the administration is cutting down the Public Integrity Section, the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, from which several attorneys resigned last month in protest of the Adams affair. The shift would push handling of such cases to politically-appointed US attorney’s offices throughout the country.
National Roundup
New York
Expert advises judge to drop Adams charges: The saga of NYC Mayor Eric Adams may be reaching its denouement, according to analysis from MSNBC following last week’s amicus brief by a court-appointed lawyer recommending that the presiding judge dismiss the case with prejudice. The advice acknowledged the dubious motivations behind the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss without prejudice, but noted the judge – unable to force the DoJ to proceed – has little latitude, and that the best option for the public good is at least to prevent the case from being used as future leverage by the Trump DoJ by dismissing with prejudice.
New Jersey
Businessman in Menendez case sentenced: Fred Daibes, a New Jersey developer who was convicted on federal charges alongside former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, was sentenced last week in a separate federal banking case, but will serve out the sentence concurrently with his previous conviction.
Alabama
Town suspends entire police forces amidst corruption scandal: After five members of the police department of tiny Hanceville, Alabama, including the chief, were arrested last month on a variety of petty corruption charges, the city council voted to suspend the department and rebuild it entirely from scratch after an intense public hearing.
New Mexico
State rocked by law enforcement “DWI enterprise” scandal: Reports that the state supreme court is considering suspending the law license of an Albuquerque attorney are the latest developments in a corruption scandal involving decades of alleged collusion between defense attorneys and officers from the Albuquerque Police Department, a county sheriff’s office, and at the state police. The case, which has already resulted in multiple federal indictments and convictions this year, involved an alleged scheme in which lawyers for drunk driving defendants bribed arresting officers not to show up to their clients’ hearings.
Trial date moved for former Dem house speaker: Former New Mexico lawmaker, Democrat Sheryl Williams Stapleton, who is facing 35 federal charges for allegedly diverting millions of dollars from Albuquerque Public Schools and was scheduled to go on trial this month, had her trial date delayed to September in February.
Arizona:
Court date looms for county power couple at center of “sprawling” corruption case: Recent local reporting that a former investigator at the Apache County Attorney’s Office admitted to threatening the political rival of his boss’s wife is the latest development in a scandal centered on the former county attorney, Democrat Michael Whiting, who held the position since 2008 and won reelection last year but was unable to assume office due to the loss of his law license. Whiting and his wife, County Superintendent of Schools Joy Whiting, were indicted in August on a range of state corruption charges, including alleged abuses related to her campaign for school superintendent, in a major local case with some decidedly strange wrinkles .
Hawaii
Plea deal ends police chief payout scandal: In a case that has been ongoing since 2015, three former Honolulu city officials pleaded guilty earlier this month to misdemeanor charges for an illegal contract buyout in 2017 for the then-chief of police, Louis Kealoha, who was under federal investigation for corruption charges at the time. Kealoha and his wife, along with several others, were convicted on federal corruption charges in 2019 in one of the highest-profile corruption scandals in Hawaii history.