The news reports are rampant, not the corruption

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It Only Seems That Political Corruption Is Rampant
By Michael Wines, January 25, 2014

With the indictment last week of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell on fraud and conspiracy charges, one might surmise that high-level political scandal is breaking out all over. And in a way, one would be right: It has been a good year, or perhaps a bad one, for hauling politicians before judges.

Three members of the House of Representatives pleaded guilty to, or were convicted of, crimes in 2013, more than any other year since 1981, when the now-cinematized Abscam sting operation put six House members and a senator behind bars. Last year, former mayors of Detroit and New Orleans, among others, were convicted of, or charged with, felonies.

Mr. McDonnell’s indictment continues a string of scandals that has led courts to find eight governors or former governors guilty of crimes since 2000, two from Illinois alone. But if one popular perception of big-time politics is that of a criminal cabal, many who study officeholders for a living disagree — and offer statistics as proof.

Political malfeasance grabs headlines, and few public failings are as colorful as a House legislator who stores $90,000 in marked bills in his basement freezer (William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, convicted of bribery, racketeering and money laundering in 2009) or one who boasts to an F.B.I. undercover agent, “I’ve got larceny in my heart” (John W. Jenrette Jr., Democrat of South Carolina, convicted of accepting bribes in the Abscam sting; Mr. Jenrette was later found guilty of shoplifting shoes and a necktie at a Marshalls department store).

Nevertheless, political analysts say, one rotten apple — or even the scores of them picked up in the past two decades — does not spoil the barrel. “I’ve studied American political corruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and, if anything, corruption was much more common in much of those centuries than today,” said Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

What has skyrocketed, he argues, is the public perception that politicians are corrupt. And to an extent, the numbers back him up.

The Justice Department’s public integrity section, which prosecutes official corruption at all levels of government, reports annually the number of public officials it has charged with corruption or convicted of corruption-related crimes. The data cover not only elected officials, but public servants from cabinet secretaries to enlisted soldiers.

Convictions of federal officials dropped nearly a quarter from 1989 to 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. Convictions of state officials doubled, thanks in part to a sharp one-time increase in 2011. Local officials’ convictions have remained comparatively steady.

A 2007 compendium of misdeed, “The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics,” concluded that fewer than 1 percent of the nearly 12,000 people who had served in Congress had been expelled, indicted or tried for crimes.

That probably is because few investigators were looking for crimes for much of that period. Still, the F.B.I. has stated that the arrest rate among the general public for white-collar crime — the sort that constitutes most political corruption — was more than 6 percent in the late 1990s.

“There’s a large majority of voters who believe it’s just endemic,” the book’s author, Kim Long, said in a telephone interview from Denver. “There’s no evidence that indicates it’s the case — zero.”

Well, perhaps not zero — particularly at lower levels of government. A 2012 study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago calculated that 31 of the approximately 100 Chicago aldermen who had served since 1973 — and four of the seven governors — had been convicted of corruption. A 1992 F.B.I. sting involving bribery and horse-racing legislation netted convictions of nearly 11 percent of the Kentucky Legislature.

At the heights of political power, some analysts say, corruption is less widespread, but seems endemic because it is intensely covered — not just by newspaper and other news media outlets, but now by phalanxes of partisan political bloggers.

A search on Google for the words “Edwin Edwards” and “indicted” produces about 16,000 mentions of Mr. Edwards, the roguish and nationally known Louisiana governor charged in 1998 with extorting bribes to reward riverboat casino licenses.

By comparison, an identical search for Mr. McDonnell, the former Virginia governor indicted just days ago, returned 113 million hits.

“The news has gotten nationalized,” Darrell M. West, the vice president of government studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said in an interview. “The mayor of Toronto is an excellent example. Here’s a mayor of a city in a foreign country, but his name and picture are plastered all over the American media.”

None of which is to say that high-level corruption is either negligible or unimportant.

Under the direction of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. shifted agents and attention from small-bore crimes like local drug trafficking and single-victim fraud to focus more intently on public corruption. The bureau said in 2011 that it was conducting more than 2,000 corruption inquiries and had secured more than 900 convictions in fiscal 2010, most involving federal officials.

In an email exchange, the chief of the bureau’s Public Corruption Unit, Brian J. Nadeau, declined to say how many investigations were underway or whether the focus on corruption — always the criminal division’s highest priority — continued to increase. 

He said, however, that the bureau “has become more strategic in the way we manage our programs and the threats.”
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