By Staff
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
– Charles DeGaulle
If you could buy stock in public corruption investigations, this growing enterprise would prove a good investment.
The FBI's Criminal Division is so swamped with cases that Assistant Director James Burrus said the bureau might run an undercover sting on Congress.
Shades of Abscam during the Carter administration in the late 1970s.
A U.S. senator and six House representatives agreed on camera to take bribes from FBI agents posing as Arab sheikhs.
So much evidence of wrongdoing is surfacing in the nation's capital that Burrus committed to creating a fourth 15- to 20-member public corruption squad in the Washington field office.
There are 56 field offices. Agents in about 30 of them have been trained in how to pursue public corruption leads.
Former Republican Reps. Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney pleaded guilty to corruption charges.
FBI agents are said to be investigating about a dozen other members of Congress, including as many as three senators.
The Justice Department also is expected to begin seeking indictments soon following a probe of the Alaska Legislature.
The FBI more than doubled its manpower to look into allegations that an oil industry services company bribed state legislators.
At the end of August the bureau carried out two dozen raids and searched the office of state Sen. Ben Stevens, son of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.
Philip Heymann, the criminal law professor at Harvard University who oversaw the Abscam investigation as chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, was quoted as saying he concluded from watching a public television documentary that "there is more corruption on Capitol Hill than I ever thought imaginable" and that an FBI sting "might result in very large numbers of prosecutions."
In the past year, 600 agents worked 2,200 public corruption cases, resulting in 650 arrests nationally, 1,000 indictments and 800 convictions, according to Burrus.
The FBI's broad investigation of a Washington lobbying ring known as "Operation Rainmaker" yielded Ney's guilty plea last month.
That inquiry also contributed to Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the House majority leader, deciding to resign, since he also faces state campaign finance charges.
FBI agents secretly taped Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., before discovering $90,000 in his freezer during a May raid.
Cell phones were wiretapped for four months while investigating Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.
In "Operation Tennessee Waltz," 10 state officials, including five current and former lawmakers, have been prosecuted.
Hidden cameras were employed as undercover agents offered payoffs to influence help for a dummy company.
In Tennessee, the targets were moving so quickly, the FBI had to decide how to put the brakes on so bills aiding the phony firm didn't actually pass into law.
Another inquiry led to the indictment of three members of San Diego's city council.
This is another argument against the mushrooming practice of "earmarks," which let lawmakers anonymously slip pet projects into larger spending bills.
Appropriations that obscure individual involvement from public scrutiny invite bribes.