Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. For years, literally years, people have been pitching me their excellent books on climate and policy and energy and democracy. And I love all the books, and I never have time to read them and do reviews, and I feel terrible about it. So we're changing that over here at Drilled. We've launched a series called Drilling Deep, in which we will be talking to authors about their books. And the hack here
is that it won't always be me. In fact, it might never be me, even though I.
Do really enjoy reading them and learning more about them. This week, Adam Lowenstein, who is doing most of these interviews for US, talks to Casey Michelle, the author of Foreign Agents, How American lobbyists and lawmakers Threatened democracy around the World. The book was actually published last year, but Michelle just wrote a really interesting piece in The Atlantic that kind of updates the thinking from the book for the second Trump administration. Just one quote, America has never
seen corruption like this. Michelle's book explored the web of lobbyists, pr gurus, and former politicians who are paid to influence the US government on behalf of foreign regimes and no surprise here. One of Trump's first moves in office was an executive order stopping enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Adam had a great conversation with Michelle. I hope you
enjoy it. Check out the book. We'll link to both the book and the Atlantic piece in the show notes, and we'll see you back here soon for more drilling.
Deep cool, let's get into it.
Yeah, good place to start is your recent piece in the Atlantic titled America has Never seen corruption like This, which pretty much sums it up. But let's start with some of the arguments you make in that piece.
Yeah. Well, thank Adam, of course. First things first, thanks for having me back. It's great to reconnect. Of course, as we were just talking off Mike, I wish it was under better circumstances, but that's the world that we live in.
Thanks for coming back on.
And yeah, we left off at an interesting place during the Biden years, and we might get into that a little.
Yes, the Biden years, I remember those fondly the past, truly as a foreign country. Yeah. Look, so the article that I have in the Atlantic that you mentioned just the other day was not pegged to anyone news development,
anyone revelation, anyone exposure, or anyone international corruption network. It was trying to survey the field over the last six months or so, now that we're about six months into the new administration, of just how frankly historic the scope and the scale of the corruption emanating from and running through the White House, and of course the broader kind of world of Trump affiliates and the Trump family and
of course the Trump organization. Truly is what I have found on my end is maybe not the most effective things, but one effective thing that I found on my end in my rioting is trying to examine historic parallels such as they are throughout predominantly American history, of networks of valances, of stories of corruption, almost all of which throughout the predominant of American history have been domestic. Donald Trump is by no means the first president of the first administration
that has been embroiled in corruption scandals. You know, I laid out at the outset of the Peace it self that you go back to the days of Ulysses S. Grant and his family members in inner circles, It go back to the days of Warren Harding and Teapot Dome. Of course, go back to the days of Richard Nixon and a Watergate, even though that is predominantly remembered as
a political story, which it absolutely was. There's also a story of rank corruption, especially corporate corruption, regarding linkages with with the White House, and that's all true. Those are all scandals under themselves. Of course, Teapot Dome for nearly a century was kind of the shorthand for presidential corruption. But what we we have seen over the last five six months now, you know, it blows all of that
out of the water. There really is no historic comparison for the scope, the scale, and of course the speed with all with which all of this has happened itself. And you can talk about specific incidents of it. You can talk, of course about the Katari Jet, the forms million dollar luxury liner gifted from a foreign dictatorship directly to a sitting president. You can talk about the crypto and the meme coins. Of course, you could talk about
the Trump organization itself. That's all perfectly true, that's all beyond anything we've ever seen before. But you could also talk about the policy developments on how the administration has really taken an absolute sledgehammer to whatever kind of anti corruption bona fides the US once had, you know, going all the way back, maybe fifty years or so in the post Watergate era is when you can really begin to examine the rise of this kind of anti corruption
regime or these anti corruption policies. Almost all of those have been completely decimated, either unenforced, completely dissolved in terms of some task forces, no resourcing for actual investigations themselves.
And of course what we've seen take place at the Department of Justice with the clear quid pro quo in terms of dropping certain prosecutions, including against our beloved mayor here in New York City, who was allegedly going around the world, especially in places like Turkey and asking for a campaign financing, which was of course the reddest of red lines. I mean, Adam, look, I could talk to you and maybe we will talk for a full hour about all of the developments out of it. That is
sort of the plan that's about the Trump administration. But it was it was an exercise in trying to get all of this into one single article. I still left plenty of material on the chopping block, right. I don't think I mentioned once maybe I mentioned in passing the role and relationships of Jared Kushner and the billions of dollars that the president's son in law has brought in from dictatorship after dictatorship, as far as anyone can tell, only because he is, of course, the son in law
of a sitting president. I mean, that's just one figure among many that I had to leave out of this article. The list goes on and on and on.
One of the things you mentioned in that Atlantic piece is the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act. Can you talk about what that law is or was, and what it means for the Trump administration to stop enforcing it.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, it's known by its acronym the FCPA, and that's what I'll generally refer to it as this was really the bedrock of America's anti corruption statutes or policies going back nearly fifty years. You know, I talked a moment ago about about Watergate. In the aftermath of Watergate and the revelations they were in and again, it wasn't just about about a burglar at the Watergate hotel.
It wasn't just about the links that Richard Nixon would go to to remain in power as Congressional investigators discovered there were any number of leading American corporations secretly bankrolling Richard Nixon's re election campaign in nineteen seventy two. Again, this was contravening all manner of campaign finance law back
in the nineteen seventies. But it wasn't just that. It was also that many of these companies were going around the world and bribing corrupt officials in places like Japan and South Korea, places like the Netherlands, but also places like Saudi Arabia, and finding corrupt regimes, corrupt officials that they could pay off to open the doors for American business and American commerce and of course keep those regimes in power for as long as they wanted as well.
And when these revelations came out, right, we're talking tens hundreds of millions of dollars, significant amounts of money. When these revelations came out, you know, it wasn't just a scandal that American companies are going around the world and bribing,
you know, autocratic regimes in places like Honduras. It is also that when those revelations came out, all of a sudden, all manner of anti American forces and political parties and movements could point to those regimes and point to those American companies and say, look at what is happening, Look at what the US is doing, what it is allowing, and look at what these American companies are doing in terms of smothering any kind of democracy again, in places
like the military dictatorship South Korea, autocracy on Honduras, so on and so on. It's funny I was rereading this earlier this morning. Some of the congressional testimonies, some of the biggest benefactors of all these revelations were things like
communist parties. Again, remember the nineteen seventies, near the height of the Cold War, and all of a sudden, the Communists can point to officials in Italy or the Netherlands or wherever it is, and say, look at just how corrupt the Americans and their lackeys in power here are.
So that's all kind of a long winded way of setting the stage for what legislators ended up doing in nineteen seventy seven, realizing just how damaging this was to American policies and an American foreign policy especially, they passed this thing called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is really I want to make sure to kind of convey just how monumental this was. This wasn't just the first time in American history that it was now a crime for
American corporations or American businessman to bribe foreign officials. This was the first time anywhere had ever passed anything like this, the first time in global history any country had made it a crime to engage in bribery, not in that country and specifically, but a foreign country in and of itself.
So again, what the FCPA does is it makes it illegal for any American in any American company, any American business person, or any foreign company that's listed on an American stock exchange, even if they're not technically American companies themselves, to engage in bribery abroad in any country around the world. And this was nineteen seventy seven, This was nearly fifty
years ago. And that's really, again I used the term earlier, the kind of the bedrock from where we saw over the ensuing decades, all of these other anti corruption policies really stem from that really declared American leadership in this space. We eventually saw it replicated in places like Canada. The European Union, United Kingdom, but also really set the kind of the baseline for where American anti corruption policy would go from there. So then eventually you had things like
Shell company transparency. Eventually you had things like new task forces dedicated to targeting and seizing and returning dirty money. Of course, you had the Department of Justice prosecuting all around the world corrupt networks. Again, that was a long winded way of saying the FCPA was wonderful, and technically it is still on the books, but in one of the very first things that Donald Trump did in returning to the presidency was announced effectively it was no longer
going to be enforced. As he saw it, it was a quote horror show of a law that prevented American businesses from engaging in routine business practices abroad and damaging American competitiveness, which is just a nice little euphemistic way of saying American companies and American businessmen should be able to bribe whoever they want without being concerned by without being worried about prosecution from the Department of Justice. It
was devastating to see. It was a monumental, even generational setback. The Silver lining is it's still on the books, and a potential future administration could of course begin reinforcing it. But it was a very clear sign of the direction this administration was going to go in.
That raises an important distinction, which is the direction of travel, the direction of corrupt travel? I guess which is The FCPA focuses on American companies illegally or unlawfully or unethically influencing governments around the world. Your book, Foreign Agents, which we talked about last year, focuses on sort of the
reverse direction of corruption. Obviously it's all interrelated, but focuses on the government's authoritarian regimes around the world hiring US officials, politicians, influencers of various kinds who have access to the US government and can shape American policy. What is the state of the corrupt Union when it comes to foreign influence on the United States?
The state of affairs right now is I don't know, terrible, terrifying, unsettling.
Yes, it depends if you are making money or not.
Oh sure, sure, it depends on what kind of line of work you're in. And I suppose what kind of morals, if any, you have about or scruples I should say about working with some of those the most heinous regimes around the world. Again, just as a little bit of context. I know Adam and I spoke about this in the past. In the United States of America, it's not illegal. It's perfectly legal for you or I or any other American to go lobby on behalf of not only any cause
that we want, but any regime that we want. You and I can right now go talk to our legislators about how actually wonderful the regime in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Gabone or Venezuela or whatever it is might be. That's predominant because in the First Amendment, we have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, which is just an old timey way of saying lobbying. You and I can go lobby for whatever cause we want. That is not illegal. All Americans have
to do is register their work. If they're being paid to do that by these foreign governments. They just have to register with the Department of Justice and declare what they're doing and disclose how much they're making and so on and so forth. And you and I can go online to the Department of Justice website and take a look through that database of all of these American lobbyists we're selling themselves to regime after regime around the world.
And again, as you just laid out, it's not even just traditional lobbyists, right, these kind of traditional lobbying firms in DC. It's a pr specialists, it's consultants, it's of course many former members of Congress or of Cabinet or previous administrations themselves. It is, you know, a whole kind of constellation of American industries are now congealing within the one broader umbrella industry of foreign lobbying. And because of Donald Trump's first term, again, this is now a multi
billion dollar industry itself. These are extremely effective lobbyists. These are extremely effective networks at implementing policies that these foreign regimes want to see implemented. And again, it's things like arms sales, it's things like the lifting or prevention of sanctions.
It's even things and we were talking about this off my in terms of climate it's even things like fast tracking energy policies that benefit hydrocarbon producers and pushing off or gutting green or clean tech reforms that again, places like China or Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia, the major oil producers do not want to see pursued. It's been extremely effective because because of Donald Trump's first term, there was kind of a rising salience about some of these threats
because it's not just that their lobbying officials. What a lot of folks realized is that these lobbyists were really enmeshing themselves in the highest levels of American policy making in any ways, crafting American foreign policy that should have been crafted by American legislators of those in the White House, but instead was being directed by these foreign lobbyists themselves.
And Adam, I can't remember when you and I spoke last, but I believe it was after, maybe right around the same time as the conviction of former Senator Bob Menendez, who was before his conviction, was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the most powerful member of American Congress in terms of crafting American foreign policy.
And a Democrat, which bears emphasizing in this moment.
He is one of the leaders, was one of the leaders for a long time of the Democratic Party, and as we also learned recently was secretly moonlighting, conspiring to act as as the jury found and guilty of a foreign agent for the military dictatorship in Egypt. He was secretly lobbying his colleagues in the Senate, secretly ghost riding
on behalf of his patrons back in Cairo. And he was the first American member of Congress to be convicted on these charges and was recently sentenced, And if I remember correctly, he is actually now in prison on a very lengthy stay for again acting as secretly a foreign lobbyist on behalf of not his constituents back in New Jersey, but the military dictatorship back in Egypt. So again, this is just all kind of a little bit of the scope and scale of what we see on the foreign
lobbying side. Fast forward to where we are right now, the current administration saying, no, we're not going to enforce any of these foreign lobbying laws. We're only going to
target those that are engaged in traditional espionage. If a foreign agent, a foreign lobbyist is somehow somewhere getting a hold of classified information and sending it back to their patrons and benefactors elsewhere, we will prosecute that but if they're not disclosing who they're working for, if they're not sharing with the American public who's actually paying them, we're not going to prosecute that whatsoever. So it really seems like, and again it's going to take years to really figure
out the breadth of this. Very much seems like we're back in the golden era, back in a golden age of these kind of foreign lobbying network being able to operate in the shadows without the rest of us having any idea what they're actually doing.
I wanted to ask you about what the state of the influence industry in Washington is right now, because, on one hand, and as you just referenced, there's tons of money to be made from foreign governments seeking influence sway
access to the Trump administration. What I wonder though, is, on the other hand, is the fact that the administration is so shameless in some ways, or the fact that Trump himself is such a you know, as has been widely report, or it makes decisions based on who talks to him most recently, who flatters him the most, whatever. Does that make it harder for some of the traditional levers of influence in Washington to do their work, because I feel like they at least sell themselves as having
access that the average person doesn't have. But if you can get access to the decider through Fox News, then does that mean you don't need to hire Brownstein or whomever.
You know. It's funny, Adam, and far be it from me to feel any kind of bad about any of these figures. But yes, there was even through Trump's first term and certainly well into the by and earra, there was a playbook that they had followed for years and years and years for decades, and it was an extension of an outgrowth of what traditional lobbying for domestic causes looked like. Right. It was the kind of the back
room conversations. It was having one on one meetings. It was in some cases donating directly to a young a member of Congresses, or even a presidential candidate's election or re election campaigns. I mean again, it's there was no real kind of secret sauce to any of it. It was about who you knew and who you could access and what kind of doors you could open. And now what we see with Donald Trump's second term is that
that playbook certainly still exists. And of course much of it does come down to, at the end of the day, who these figures, knowing what doors they can open. But the range of tactics and tools now available has just
been blown out of the water, you know. Again, to get back to what we were talking about a few moments ago, I never in a thousand years thought I would ever see the day that a foreign regime, in this case out of Katar, would be able to gift a four hundred million dollar luxury liner a airplane to a sitting president. And yet, and yet here we are.
I never thought I would see a world in which a sitting president has direct access to not only the so called coins, but of course is more than willing and more than happy to host these effective pay to play dinners for both Americans and non Americans alike those who have given or invested the most amount of money
in a specific crypto venture. And of course I never thought that I would actually see I should have had an idea with Trump's first term, but I never thought I would actually see the day where he's sitting president has his real estate company gallivanting around the world and signing up deals in dictatorship after dictatorship, foreign country after form coach. I mean, this is all just unprecedented and completely uncharted waters, as we talked about earlier, completely without
any kind of historic precedent. And I don't know how traditional lobbying firms are adapting, but I do think it is indicative that one of the key figures that has opened up Donald Trump to the world of crypto and crypto related investments is someone who emerged from that traditional lobbying world, and that is our old friend Paul Manifort, who was Donald Trump's first campaign manager and sixteen helped launch into the presidency, eventually jailed on foreign lobbying charges
and then pardoned by Trump, and now in the last year or two has emerged as this key player in the crypto space that we know from other reporting, has led Donald Trump directly into that space and of course opened up all manner of new areas of influence. So there's a man of fort is many things, but there is a certain skill set that he brings to bear in terms in terms of opening up avenues of influence.
What are the currencies of influence these days? You mentioned crypto being a big one. You know, there's been some reporting about you know, the Saudi government, among others, really going all in on AI and data centers to woo the administration and its tech oligarch backers. But what are how are they? What are they trafficking in these days?
Well, I mean, look at the barest element of explanation is money, right, It's it's whatever means of financing directly into the American president's pocket, his family's pockets, his business pockets, his allies pockets. It's whatever the vehicle of value is. And if that's opening up a new resort in Vietnam, Trump Resort in Vietnam, so be it. If that is spending three hundred million dollars or investing three hundred million dollars on a Trump meme coin so you can have
dinner with the president, so be it. If that is an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates agreeing that it will exchange or participate in exchanges using that Trump meme coin or whatever the other crypto venture is, you know, so be it. I mean, it's funny that you mentioned AI.
This is actually a space. I don't think it's gotten nearly enough attention, but because of not only not only the developments in the space, and of itself and the implications of either domestic or especially foreign investment in artificial intelligence. But it's a very clear direction that especially the Saudi's
and the Emordies have gone in. And I don't remember the figure, I don't have the figures off the top of my head, but the most recent visit from or agreement between President Trump and golf partners, hundreds of millions of dollars in golf investment in artificial intelligence, opening up of data centers, and of course providing leverage from these regimes themselves over whether it's American AI companies themselves or
American AI policy writ large. Again, there's no admiration whatsoever, but you do have to comment on the relative savvy I suppose of figures like NBS in Saudi Arabia or NBZ in the United Arab Emirates, realizing which way the wind is blowing, and of course realizing that they are all manner of tech oligarchs surrounding Donald Trump and his presidency and more than willing to back him come hell or high water, and then opening up these new streams
of investment from these dictatorships elsewhere. I mean, look, it's all it's one investment vehicle after another. And it's funny, I will say, you know you and I are speaking here on July twenty second, and just yesterday the administration announced that it is going to be, you know, charitably kicking the can down the road about new anti money laundering rules and regulations for American private equity and venture
capital and hedge funds. These were anti minor learning policies that were supposed to be implemented back in the early two thousands, but because of a so called temporary loophole, just have never been implemented. And the Biden administration announced finally they were going to require these private investment funds again that manage total trillions, if not tens of trillions of dollars, to just check where that money is coming from and flag any concerns for the American government, for
the federal government. What we saw yesterday is the new administration, the Treasure Department announcing no, we're not going to pursue those rules and regulations. We're going to open it up
for discussion. We're going to reconsider, and in the meantime, all these private investment funds will be able to have an absolute feast and open their doors to anyone and everyone they want, foreign regimes, foreign oligarchs, proxies, what have you, and acting all of that money and all of that wealth into the American economy and throughout the American economy without any kind of transparency, any kind of due diligence
in this whatsoever. And you know, we talked a moment ago about Jared Kushner, and it's funny because you know, he left the first administration without any private investment, private equity experience whatsoever. He was a let's call it, struggling real estate developer before he joined Trump's first White House.
And then he left and almost immediately began taking in billions of dollars for his own private investment fund from the Saudis, from the Emiraldis, from the Kataris, without any kind of experience, any kind of reason to believe that those investments would be successful in terms of returning capital
back to those regimes. But you know, I don't want to cast dispersions, but it certainly looks like it's going in one direction in terms of influence and in terms of access to the man that is now the son in law of the city President. And again that's just one figure and one fund on the private investment site, among a whole slew of others that are still open and available to anyone and everyone.
It is remarkable how much money these regimes have access to and how desperate they seem to be defined anywhere to invest it. And most of it comes from oil, which I think is not new in the sense that it's not breaking news, but also bears emphasizing given some of these regimes at the same time at least are maintaining the facade of transitioning their economies and participating in
global climate negotiations, transitioning their economies away from oil. But at the same time, all of this money is related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels, and it finally has somewhere to go. I'd be curious what you think of this. It seems like any reason for which a Western investor or investment fund manager might have had for not a accepting that money, any any compunction, I guess is the word no longer exists. Is that a
fair way to put it. There's really no shame associated with taking that money anymore.
No, No, there's no shame. There's no compunction there's no reason, and then there's no even structural incentive to say no, not only because you know, you should have extremely minimal concern about any kind of investigation or prosecution so long as you remain in the current administration's good graces, but also because you know if you if you do say no, then your competitor down the street will say yes, or if they don't say yes, and some other competitor will
end up opening their doors. And again, this is a dynamic we have seen elsewhere. It's a dynamic that does predate the current president. It's something that we saw in the lobbying industry or at large. It's something that we saw in the consulting industry, in particular in working with regimes like Saudi Arabia. It's I know, you could you can look at, you know, oil producing regime after oil
producing regime around the world. You can look at Russia, you can look at Equatorial Guinea, you can look at Libya, you can certainly look at Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan. But of course the one that we mentioned already a few times
is Saudi Arabia. It is a breathtaking and I hope there are multiple books coming out about it in the very near future to see the scope and the breadth of opportunities that Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund has opened up for the regime, and of course almost all of that money, if not all of it, coming from the
production of oil and the broader climate destruction therein. Because it's funny, because if you go back to twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, after the assassination of the journalist Jamalkashoci, Saudi Arabia and MBS in particular, they weren't exactly persona non grata, but they were having lobbying clients, consulting clients, even investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US turn them away and turn them down and say we will not have any business, we will not be seen to be
doing any business with this regime. And again, you want to talk about the past being a foreign country, and that was only six seven years ago. I can't even
fathom getting to that point again. I have no idea that the Saudi regime would have to do to get to that point once more, where American lobbying shops, American investors are turning down Saudi money because you know, you can just cast around the American economy, whether it's in Hollywood, whether it is in the sports industry, especially things like golf or tennis or boxing. I'm sure at some point down the line, the NBA and the NFL will be
opening themselves up to Saudi money. I hope to god it's not my beloved Portland Trailblazers who are currently for sale and I live in dread that the Saudis will be the one to purchase them, or or of course again all of the image management shops or even things
like Twitter or x Right. You know, it's just a bottomless list of industries that have opened themselves up to investments from the regime or open themselves up to the private investment the private equity, hedge fund and venture capital firms that have opened themselves to with to Saudi financing itself. And again it's not just Kushner, it's the Injuries and
Horowitzes of the world. I mean, it really is the biggest names across industry after industry that are now being bankrolled directly by or at least indirectly via these private investment funds. Saudi wealth, that oil money, that the Saudis now have and I think they're going to pass the one trillion mark shortly, if they haven't already for the private investment fund. And again, this is just one regime
of many that are realizing. Oh, in the United States of America, it is now the golden era of white collar crime, right. The crime wave is here. It is just white collar, as another writer, Jacob Silverman wrote in his new book, and it's not going to end anytime soon.
That gets at the thing that seems most profound in some ways. There's obviously the scale of the literal corruption as we've talked about, but there's also just the sense of shame that used to be associated with it. And this comes to mind when you mentioned the years following the murder of Jamal Kaschogi, and there was at least a pretense that companies were turning away from doing business
with a regime that would murder journalists. That was, there was always an element of performance there, because they were clearly hungry for that money and got back in as
soon as they could. But what feels different about the last certainly the last six months, but even the last couple of years, is just how quickly that pretense has faded, or at least the sense that they need to keep up that performance, and there's just been sort of a collective shrug in some ways because it's just too much, And I wonder what you make of that.
You know, again, charitably, if you just pull back and examine the kind of incentive structures that these firms, these industries written large or are engaging in, you know, there is a reality that if they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, or if they just have any kind of
general profit driven motive, yes, orls are great. But if you're not committing any crime and you don't have to be concerned about any prosecution, then all you're doing is seeding ground to your competitors who have fewer scruples in you, or maybe who knows, maybe they have just as many scruples as you, but also can read the landscape and realize that if they don't do this, they don't make that kind of first mover step, then someone else will. And you know, you can look at this from a
lot of different different vantages. You can look at this from the perspective of, you know, people who are hired as as representatives of these regimes, saying, oh, you know, I'm actually a good guy. I'm gonna put this money to good use. And of course if I'm inside the tent rather than outside, it can make more of a difference.
You can look at it geopolitically. I remember, of course, I guess he was then a candidate, Joe Biden saying we're going to make Saudi Arabia parian nation, pariah's status. And it was what two months, three months in his first term where he's there fist bumping MBS itself.
And asking for more oil production.
And asking from oil production. Of course, the American Saudi partnership has decades and decades behind it at this point. And I will say, you know, it's funny, and I don't remember if we talked about this last time, but there's a chapter of the book of the Foreign Agents Book which quotes one of these lobbyists from back in the early nineteen nineties who was working for people like Saddam Hussein or the vin dictator in places like Liberia,
I mean, truly the world's worst. And someone asked him about it, you know, he said, well, look, it's at the end of the day, it's just money and as he said, shame is for sissies. That was his quote, and that's what ended up being one of the chapter titles. And I think that is an ethos that was maybe a little ahead of its time, because that is certainly something that we see every single day. I mean, there is no if there ever was space for or consideration
of something like shame every day. It appears an outdated phenomenon and term. And that's too bad, because shame can be a wonderful tool in the right hands.
Yeah, sometimes the only tool we have too.
Yeah, it is funny because this is what does The kind of ethos of the first four lobbying regulations was, Look, we're not going to ban this. This is all the way back in the nineteen thirties when they were exposed as working for the Nazis and the Soviets and Mussolini. We can't ban this, but if we bring it to light, bring some transparency, we can shame these Americans into no
longer working with these regimes. And rarely has that worked. Again, It's one thing that's been very nice in theory, but when you talk about the kind of money involved in practice, it is very rare.
I wanted to ask you, and this might be a hot take that's not worth taking, but it's not a
leading question. I'm genuinely curious what you think. If there's anything to be celebrated is too strong of a word, if there is a silver lining of some kind in the sense that the Trump regime is doing a lot of this stuff so clumsily and shamelessly and publicly, and a lot of this stuff has been going on again to a lesser extent, but as you've pointed out in the book, and as we've talked about previously, has been
going on for decades. Just now it's happening in the open because there's no sense of consequence or shame associated with it. Is there anything to be celebrated about that fact that people can actually see what's sort of always happened.
Yeah, I mean the silver lining is it's impossible to escape this. You cannot push it away, as there in your news feed every single day. It is overwhelming, It is breathtaking, and it forces you to consider, how is it that this is happening? Why is it that this is happening? And of course the secondary question is, okay, well, if these policies were in place before Trump and he can simply use them through his advantage or trample them underfoot.
What does that mean for a potential future administration if we do want to shore up if we can possibly shore up America's kind of anti corruption, counter cryptocracy regime itself.
And it's funny because I'm working on. The next book that I'm working on is looking at the rise of this oligarchic class in the United States of America and how that oligarchic class is transformed into not only threats domestically in terms of American democracy, but also begun allying with foreign regimes themselves that have no interest in restoring
things as simple as American democracy. And one of the things that I'm hoping to do with this book is examine the kind of lessons and the periods of previous successful reforms. There's two primary ones. There's the nineteen hundred and nineteen ten broader progressive era really linked to the
Teddy Roosevelt administration. There were other, of course, players involved, and that was the aftermath of the Gilded Age, which is the first kind of really true oligarchic class and the kind of threats they are in and that resulted in all kinds of things, right, successful prosecutions of course, antitrust, mobilization and crackdowns, but also campaign finance reforms, because there's one thing that we haven't talked about yet today, and
that's campaign finance and the role and legacy of things like Citizens United in further distorting and in many ways i mean degrading, maybe not quite destroying this to the point yet American democracy, but really taking again a sledgehammer to any kind of sanctity or sovereignty of American democracy. You go back to the progressive era and minds of
lessons there. And then the other one we've already talked about, which is the post Watergate era, and that was the creation not only the FCPA, but even the Federal Election Commission, which is again one of those things that on paper it looks like it would have been fantastic but very quickly fell apart. And what kind of lessons can we mind therein So, yes, it's a silver lining. And it's tough to see those silver linings when you're in the
middle of such a dark cloud as this one. But yeah, if you get your binoculars and you appear pretty far, sure you can see it out there.
One of the things we talked about last time was the bipartisan history of foreign influence pedaling, and we had talked about how weirdly one of the good, positive, small baby steps that the Trump administration, the first one, had taken, was requiring disclosure of foreign funding for US universities and US think tanks, and how the Biden administration had essentially stopped enforcing that. Have there been any developments on either of those fronts since No.
Next question this is, Look, there's plenty of disappointing things to see in the past few months, and one of them is this inability to build on even these small victories we have seen. No, there has not been any progress in terms of think tank disclosure and in terms of university disclosure. Not that that can't change. I wouldn't be surprised if we see increasing investigations and transparency requirements
for American universities. Perhaps not for the best reasons, but I don't know, because one of the things that the Trump administration wants to do is completely abolished the Department of Education, which is the one that houses all of the transparency data about how American universities have been taking in tens of millions, hundreds of millions in some cases billions of dollars from authoritarian regimes around the world in terms of gifts and contracts, And if they eliminate the
Department of Education, then that goes out out the window. So yeah, sorry, Adam, I don't have good news.
Well here's here's more shot at finding good news. Was a headline or some reporting that the Wall Street Journal has done over the last couple of months about the General Services Administration, which, telling Lee is now run by a former KKR private equity fund executive, but requiring or demanding of consulting giants like McKinsey and BCG Etcenter, my former employer Ey and others, to basically justify their huge
federal contracts. I wonder what you make of that effort, whether it's sort of just a anti quote unquote woke, anti DEI effort, or if it actually there's some substance to telling consulting firms to justify these billions of dollars worth of taxpayer contracts.
I I would think that if anyone is well placed to justify billions of dollars of contracts, it would be these consulting firms. They'll find a way, they'll they'll find a way. Of course, in theory, there's there's nothing wrong. It's it's like the it's like doge right. In theory, yes, of course we should root out fraud and waste and abuse. And yes, of course American tax paid dollars should be used for the you know, to the to the first this extent they can for the for the minimum amount.
But that's all fine in theory, of course, saying this in practice for reasons that maybe they stem from DEI considerations and quote unquote anti Wote considerations. Maybe there was just someone at BCG or McKenzie or whomever that caught the eye of someone who has Trump's ear. Like I, I don't know what is actually leading this this push itself. I mean, I will say, of course I have no love lost for any of these firms, many of these firms,
maybe a few, maybe a few of them. And again, something you and I have talked about in the past is how many of these firms McKenzie, t Enao, Boston Consulting Group have worked for regimes like Saudi Arabia and again, open up the US to any number all manner of Saudi influence as well as plenty of other regimes around the world, and the one that comes to mind recently, and it was the Financial Times that did this great reporting on how Boston Consulting Group had been involved, or
at least a number of senior partners have been involved in euphemistically creating exit packages for Palestinians from Gaza to effectively whitewash Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns. So no, I when it comes to the Trump administration in some of these consulting firms, please don't ask me who I'm rooting for. Yeah, but we'll see what comes.
I suspect they'll all find a way to win at everyone else's expense as they as they typically do.
Yes, I think that's fine.
The BCG in Gaza contracts were so revealing in the sense that one of the things you talk about in your book Foreign Agents, is the work that Ivy Lee, the quote unquote father of public relations, did for the Nazi regime, And you can draw a direct line from that type of work in the nineteen thirties to the type of work that BCG has been reportedly doing in the twenty twenties. And it's the same playbook with different actors different sums of money.
Yeah, you know, as Ivy Lee saw it, Adolf Hitler was bringing stability to one of the key economic and national well nations in Europe. He was a bulwark against far left communism emanating from the Soviet Union. And at the end of the day, if the Americans didn't partner with him, then other regimes who are maybe opposed to American interests would partner with him. And don't we want to get in on the ground floor. Don't we want
to at least hear what he has to say. And yes, maybe he has his foibles, and maybe there are some concerns about what's happening domestically, but look, a lot of that is just rhetoric. We don't really need to be concerned about what Adolf Hitler is doing in Germany or in Europe. And you can find a way to justify if you want, and certainly if you are being paid,
you can find a way to justify almost anything. And it has been remarkable to watch Boston Consulting Group try to scramble to explain away how multiple senior partners were involved in ethnic cleansing, or green lighting ethnic cleansing, or spinning ethnic cleansing, and it's just a very short step
from there to outright genocide. And I have no doubt that there are at least some folks in some of these firms that have already considered what are the best talking points if we do see a genocide or emerge wherever it is right, whether it's in Palaesinon or Meanmar or Sudan, there's money to be made, and if we don't make it, our competitors will. And at the end of the day, who needs shame anywhere.
There was a pattern that played out during the first Trump administration of because Trump and his administration were so you know, corrupt, outrageous, offensive, crude, that companies could essentially step into the breach and be the benevolent, sane, competent actors in society. That was I think part of what drove the rise of so called ESG and corporate sustainability and all this stuff, which is has been a trend. That was not the first time companies had pretended to
save the world. They tend to do this when they're facing a lot of backlash. And I wonder if you've seen that same pattern play out again this time if they're trying to step in and say, you know, he's off the rails, but we got this, or if they're more like we're just going to ride that wave and cash in, well, I.
Mean, I guess I'm be keen for your perspective. I certainly haven't seen any indication of that. And again, I think it's multifold. One, we are only six months into the new administration. Who knows where we'll be a year from now, who knows what will happen after the terms, and of course who knows what will actually be taking
place the final year of this second term. And two, we've seen how aggressive the current administration is about swatting down or suffocating or whatever term you'd like to use private interest that may be opposed to the current administration using the power of the state to specifically target any in all private organizations, maybe most spectacularly in media with paramount in the ABC settlements, that would even think about speaking out about the current administration. I Adam, what do
you have any thoughts on this? Yeah?
I mean I don't have a more optimistic take, that's for sure. It does feel like they got their tax cut in twenty seventeen. End of twenty seventeen, so they kind of got what they wanted from the administration, and then those next couple of years it was kind of it seemed like they either saw an opportunity or felt an obligation to at least pretend that they were the adults in the room. They were the serious people when Trump was off the rails, even if they shared ultimately
the same economic goals. And I agree, now it feels like either they're too afraid to do that, but I think more realistically they're not interested in doing that performance anymore because they feel like they don't have to.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, you know, the big beautiful bill just passed a few weeks ago. Of course, those many of those tax cuts we saw in twenty seventeen or are now permanent, you know, again at a very what we were talking about earlier, maybe a macro level. Right there is no concern about any kind of white collar prosecution. There's no concern about any fraud prosecution. There's
no concern about of course, foreign bribery prosecution. I mean, and again, white collar crime is wide open right now as long as you stay in the good graces of the administration. You know, the only time that we saw any kind of outspoken concerns from leaders within the private industry space was after the think I guess it was in April, if I remember correctly. The first was it
Liberation date? Right, the announcement of what these tariffs were going to look like, and of course the shutter that that's sent through private industry that did become more outspoken about their concerns about what the administration was doing. And I wonder if they can argue to themselves that it seems like, oh okay, it was those concerns that that put these tariffs kind of off into the future, and
we were able to sway President Trump. As far as I could tell, it was just the bond markets, as Trump said, getting jumpy or yippy, whatever the term was, that dissuaded him. And clearly tariffs, at least the discussion of them, have not gone anywhere. Every single day it seems like there's a new proposal, there's a new announcement,
there's a new postponement, so on and so forth. And I know, of course, I don't know how all this is going to end, but I especially don't know if or what a breaking point would look like for private industry regarding at least the terror of conversation, and I don't know if there is one, given how the administration has used the power of the state thus far to target its opponents.
And it's not like there aren't opportunities in tariffs to raise prices. We saw that almost immediately, where you know, even before tarists had taken effect or on industries that weren't affected by it, they were saying, we have to raise our prices because the tariffs. And it's sort of like what they did with inflation a couple of years ago, where you know, it's an opportunity to get away with price increases.
At the very least, it degrades quality of life for the rest of us. It makes things harder, makes things more expensive. And if Trump, being the political savant that he has apparently been over the last decade, is able to distance himself sufficiently from those price increases and for
goods and services, I wouldn't put it past him. And of course, if private industry is not unified in speaking out, or at least sufficiently unified speaking out against this, I look I look forward to decades of decline with you, Adam and commiserating over silver lining, but can't quite get it. Boy, that was a depressing comment. I'm sorry.
I mean it's it's realistic and actually related to that, I want to ask you how you are you're sort of personally as a human being covering this stuff right now, how you are processing this time and history on.
My most optimistic days. It is what we were talking about earlier, trying to convince myself that this is a period similar to what we saw in the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, and similar what we saw in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies in terms of not only things like wealth inequality or corporates sway and lording over American politics, but of course abuse of power, especially out of the executive office itself. And now no historic parallel
is it's exactly parallel. Of course, this era is completely
different in so many ways. But it is trying to find a historic resonance that gives me reason to believe that there is to use an overused image, a pendulum swing in the offing coming in the near future, and on my most optimistic days, that is what I like to consider, and of course it is going to be part of the book itself now on my most pessimistic days, it is simply the reality and the notion that all empires fall, and the United States of America has always
been and continues to be an empire in some cases in the most literal sense, with any number of territories that we still have not yet elevated to its statehood. But of course, the kind of entangling of corporate finance within American elections, in American campaigns, and the reduction of any kind of American democratic input from American voters in
the American populace. And this isn't even considering things like the fiscal crisis that is now even further staring us down the pipeline at some point in the not too distant future. So I swing between those depending on the day. And I know we talked about media diet a little bit off the mic, but I will say one thing that gets me through this. You can see a stack
of Batman comics behind me that always help. But also just reading widely on things that have nothing to do with American history, or in some cases nothing to do with history whatsoever. It is you got to have those mental health breaks. You can just be following the news all day long, or you'd probably die.
It's a I mean, I too, am finding a lot of solace in books and specifically almost less the subject matter in some cases, and more the analog print book, where there are no links, there are no ads, there's no breaking news. I know, it wasn't written by an algorithm. There's sort of a hard separation from the reality of the world. And I will actually say the version of the world that comes through the media is not the whole reality. This is not some you know, raging against
the fake news media or whatever. But there is a you know, obviously an algorithmic bias toward outrage, and there is a rebalancing. I feel like, whether it's a graphic novel or a comic or just a print book, that that helps me reset a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Look, I'm gonna put my old.
Man hat on and that's my favorite hat.
That. Yeah, I have to read analog books, right, I mean I I don't have a kindle, I don't have a nook, right, I have a pen and I have I have my book and that's and that's how we're doing. Of course, this is one of the benefits of reading history is realizing that, oh, you know, the sky has been falling for every nation for centuries, from millennia so on and so on and so on, and who knows, maybe we'll get through this or maybe we won't, but
much of it is beyond our control. And you know, you try to do your good work where you can. You try to make a difference with where you can, and you try to spend time with people that you care about and who care about you. In turn, let me ask you, Adam, have you read any good books recently, either of fiction non fiction.
I have read lots of good books. I was actually rereading just the other day, There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz.
Sure, yeah, it's a I've not read that one, but yeah, I'm familiar.
I think it came out in nineteen ninety one. But Coolowitz, who I believe is still doing this kind of journalism, was living or spending a lot of time with the family in a housing project in Chicago in the late eighties and basically following these two brothers and their family over a few years and just documenting what happens in their lives. And I'd read it before, but it hits a little differently now. I guess every book, you know, if you reread something, it's always going to hit a
little bit differently. Yeah, but it's I'm definitely finding myself drawn to books that were written kind of pre twenty tens, and just because the world that they capture is so it's not entirely analog, obviously, but compared to where we are right now, it was just moving at a different speed.
And maybe that's just because a millennial. Of course, I'm drawn to the nineties and early two thousands, but it's it's been a good balance for my normal fiction diet of like dystopian cli fi, which I'm having a harder time reading these days.
I recently read in terms of dyscope, it's not quite cli fi. I'm assuming that means climate fiction. I guess I haven't heard that ten before. There was a book came out a few years ago called Prophet Song set in a near future dystopian civil war autocratic Ireland, and the kind of drivers for that and what it means, what it takes for one family to survive. And again it's those perspectives to realize, oh, well, we're not quite there yet, so maybe things aren't all horrible, all terrible
all the time. Yes, mining it is funny because you know, mining those books and from the eighties and nineties and the two thousands before the kind of efflorescence of smartphones and all internet all the time, and of course now all apps all the time. It really is in many ways, like visiting a foreign land, similar themes, similar topics in some cases, similar figures and forces in some cases, which
it led directly to where we are now. But revisiting that, relearning that, and re examining what that era held, and storing what we're right around the corner, of course, is maybe more important now than ever, maybe growing importance every day, or at least maybe it's just something to keep us busy between doom school.
All possibilities and all valuable ones. And I wish we had less to talk about, but here we are. I am grateful for your work and your sense making of everything happening these days. And I'm glad you've kept the faith and kept the strength to keep doing this stuff, because it is important, even when it feels like the stuff that you and I talk about human rights, democracy, corruption, don't you know not at the top of the Project twenty twenty five, let's say, well.
To quote one of my favorite Batman movies, Adam, the night is the darkest just before the dawn. And maybe
it's not as dark as we can see. Maybe things will get darker, yet I suspect they probably will, and I certainly hope that there is a dawn coming at some point, or at the bare minimum, you and I can reconvene here in a few months or a few years time, whenever it is, and have more intellectually interesting things to talk about, even if it means the world is in a little bit worse place, because you've got to look for those advantages in those silver linings where
you can, and you know, again, try to have conversations that are worthwhile. So I appreciate you having me on today to talk about some of these things.
Good place to end, Thanks again, Casey.
All right, Thanks Adam,