How Does a Public Record of Corruption Move the Needle?

On April 15, 2026, Democratic Congressman Joe Morelle announced a new Anti-Corruption and Democracy Reform Task Force. Some of those advising House Democrats on the task force have framed the effort as taking a political lesson from Hungary, where Viktor Orbán's April 12 defeat was driven to great extent by popular frustration over a well-documented record of corruption. It is important to note, however, that Rep. Morelle has given the task force a broad and nonpartisan framing. His press release states that the Task Force will look at the executive branch, Congress, the courts and money in elections, to “examine corruption across all levels of government and advance reforms to strengthen transparency, accountability, and public trust.” 

US political corruption and efforts to root out that corruption is neither new, nor some past relic. Just last year, former Senator Robert Menendez was sentenced to prison for bribery and related charges. But President Trump has been a particular lightning rod for the anti-corruption community. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington catalogued conflicts of interest during the first Trump term; an effort that continues now. Since January 2025, the press has covered the FCPA enforcement pause, the issuance of pardons, the President’s cryptocurrency holdings, his business deals in the Middle East, and more. Recent oil future trades, seemingly timed with developments in the war in Iran – trades which Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called “treason” – will be scrutinized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 

There is a range of critical questions for any country to consider in the light of corruption allegations. Will press or civil society reporting break through to a wider, less engaged public? Will that information shape citizens’ voting behaviors? Given political polarization, is it possible to build a shared understanding about the conduct of any current or former leader? Perhaps most importantly, what should a country do moving forward: is documenting corruption sufficient to act as a future deterrent? Should a subsequent government pursue asset recovery? Finally, there are major questions about the feasibility – or advisability – of criminal prosecution of a former leader for corruption. The track record from other countries gives a mixed picture. 

As Freedom House has written, “Legal cases against former heads of state are commonplace in healthy democracies.” But the risks stemming from such cases are also clear. Researchers at Harvard and Columbia identified an "accountability dilemma" whereby prosecuting former leaders can “have the benefit of enforcing the rule of law, but also risks eroding trust in legal institutions and democratic values.” The Brennan Center argued, as Trump faced prosecution after his first term (importantly, for business-related allegations not tied to his political career), that holding past leaders accountable is critical for democracy, but “weaponized prosecutions intended to settle political scores or sideline popular leaders are a real and serious concern” and risk “undermining trust in institutions and widening societal divisions.” 

In fact, both established democracies, such as France, and democracies with more complex histories, like South Korea and Argentina, have successfully prosecuted former leaders for corruption. At the same time, the results of other efforts have been less clear-cut. In Brazil, even after President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva was jailed for accepting bribes, he was eventually re-elected. In South Africa, the Zondo Commission provided a detailed account of "state capture, corruption and fraud" under Jacob Zuma, but while some assets were recovered and reforms passed, very few prosecutions resulted. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been able to use the levers of state power to forestall his own court case for corruption allegations. In Pakistan, a court eventually overturned the corruption conviction of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. A different example is offered by Ukraine, where civil society-driven revelations about the scale of corruption under Viktor Yanukovych helped in the consolidation of a national identity. Of course, Ukraine is one of multiple instances in which a corrupt leader flees and assets are eventually recovered, ostensibly to be used for critical national needs.

Overall, as these various examples show, the difficult problem is not collecting evidence of corruption, but rather what comes next. Beyond the difficult questions of whether or not to prosecute, moving the needle requires translating documented corruption into something that citizens can connect to their own lives, mobilizes them politically, shifts their sense of their relationship to the state and helps build governments that are accountable to the people.

Marc Schleifer

Governance, Democracy and Economic Development Expert