Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

The corruption that Peter Schweizer has spent his career exposing has evolved. The old model, cash in a freezer, the crude mechanics of a transaction, has given way to something more sophisticated and far harder to see. In Secret Empires, Schweizer maps the architecture of the new corruption: multibillion-dollar equity deals conducted in the shadows, and foreign investment vehicles that allow the families of American politicians to profit from business arrangements that would be illegal if the politicians themselves pursued them directly. An American bank opening in China must follow rules that prevent it from hiring the relatives of top Chinese officials. A Chinese bank opening in America faces no such restriction, and can invite the friends and families of American politicians to invest in deals with essentially guaranteed returns. Schweizer follows the money across the political spectrum, examining questionable arrangements connected to figures close to Obama, Biden, Kerry, McConnell, and others whose names rarely appear in the same sentence as corruption. The pattern, he argues, is not partisan. It is structural, a new form of cronyism in which the coin of the realm is access, and the currency is paid to the next generation. Deeply researched, rigorously documented, and politically explosive.