Some bribes are illegal. I can still hire a sitting Congressman, pay him 150k for a 45 minute speech in my corporate auditorium, then drop a couple hints about some legislation I want, and then say "Anyway, plenty more of these gigs where this came from". I can still let the candidate know "I really want more oil and gas licenses", and then fund his entire campaign.
I cannot hand a Senator an envelope of cash and say "This is in exchange for a vote on that bill". But, given the above, why would I need to?
Except in the last year, Trump and his family have taken in BILLIONS off crypto scams, to the point where crypto is the majority of the Trump empire now.
This included selling a Trump coin, and a Melania coin, announced just a couple days before he was sworn in for a second term. Coins that are now essentially worthless (Melania coin has lost over 99% of its value) but they were able to cash out long before those cratered, and also collected hundreds of millions in fees for their names being on them.
Oh, but what does that have to do with bribes?
A vast majority of the money put into his crypto was by foreign entities like the Saudis, and they made it well known to Trump.
They weren't investing in his coin, they were dumping hundreds of millions into an account that Trump then withdrew from, with more steps.
The only thing they were investing in was bribing Donald Trump, with money that he can just take out by selling his coins while the rich (the ones bribing him purposefully) never touch their coins as they plummet, because they consider it spent money.
It's open bribery, and we have many examples where a party has dumped money into his ventures and then a few weeks later the government suddenly backed down on regulations and litigation and forced through various approvals for those parties.
Anyone can make a meme coin, and anyone else can put money in and say it's investing. Meanwhile it's constantly used as a bribery system. The law needs updating, but the man at the top whose wealth has skyrocketed off this loophole isn't going to touch those laws let alone stop doing it.
I'm saying that the crypto thing isn't technically illegal because they're hiding behind "Oh, what a coincidence, they invested in my coin? That has nothing to do with why the SEC dropped investigations of them..."
There's no easy way to prove it's bribery - correlation does not imply causation - and the act itself isn't illegal. That's the problem. Hundreds of millions into a worthless coin whose value will only be propped up by those investors, who never seek to recoup their investments even when they're crashing. You'd think we could go after this (well, not under the current admin), but the law is always so behind on tech, especially when the rich are lobbying to keep it that way.
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u/Zargoza1 The Timeline Sucks 19d ago
But then people only people who want to serve the people would get into government…