Devlin Barrett

beyond what they were intended to do.

And over a number of years, the Supreme Court has basically whittled away at how federal corruption laws can be used and has repeatedly sent a signal to the Justice Department that certainly the conservatives on the court believe that the Justice Department is, in many cases, misusing or overusing corruption statutes to go after politicians.

Well, exactly.

And one of the ways that this case gets argued about among lawyers is there's something called stream of benefits corruption, which makes the argument that you don't need a very explicit quid pro quo.

You don't need a very explicit, you give me X dollars and I will do Y for you.

Right.

That what you can have is a sort of corrupt flow relationship where I do the following things for you like cash and you in exchange do the following things for me like official favors, like getting contracts.

But the court has to believe that it's explicit.

It can't just be a vague set of actions.

That's the argument for how you could charge a case like this.

I mean, look, as someone who covers the Justice Department and the FBI, I will tell you that there are many corruption cases that are hard to follow, hard to explain, hard to just unravel and unpack.

Crypto isn't an easy thing to explain.

Sure.

You know what is easy to explain?

A cab a bag full of cash.

That's pretty simple.

Why did he take a bag of cash?

What did he do with the cash?

Hmm.

And in addition to how simple a bag of cash is, we know from the reporting that an audio tape exists somewhere.