HWFO Guide to Selling Political Influence

The Quid Pro Quo Shuffle

Herein, we will describe one of many interesting ways to become fabulously wealthy as an American politician. This may become a series.

One: Get Elected

We will not go into any detail on this, other than choose one of the two primary political parties and definitely not Libertarian, as the game theory of First Past The Post voting always devolves into a system where everyone choses between two and only two worst options. More on that here:

Two: Write Letters of Recommendation

It is quite common for people who hold political positions to write letters of recommendation for upcoming college kids, especially for the service academies and Ivy League schools. For step two, you’ll want to write a lot of these. Write them for all your friends’ kids, and any donors you know personally. Don’t charge money for these. You’re doing this to establish a pattern of behavior where everyone knows that you do in fact write letters of recommendation for free.

These letters have immense value, because if you’re a kid with a letter of recommendation from a congressman, senator, vice president, or similar, you’re basically a shoe-in for any school as long as your grades aren’t terrible. Colleges are first and foremost seeking prestige in their classes, and these letters convey an impressive amount of prestige signaling. Given how Ivy League salaries are so disproportionate to the actual education they convey, these letters could be worth as much as a quarter million dollars each, and they’re basically free to write.

Three: Have a Son or Daughter

This is an important step in the monetization scheme, because you can’t sell these letters directly without being accused of quid pro quo. Selling them on senatorbjsletters.com will tip everyone off and create a shitstorm, so you have to sell each letter informally, and you have to do so with a bagman with whom you’d commonly share finances. A family member with whom you have blended finances is the perfect bagman.

Four: Your Son/Daughter Cuts the Deals

Your Family Bagman makes informal arrangements with rich businessmen with whom you have no connection at all, lets them know that they can get a letter of recommendation for a fee, as much as perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, but leaves no paper trail of the transaction. It’s all done by handshake. Then you meet with the businessman for coffee, write the letter, and he wires the Family Bagman the quarter million dollars which goes into a blended account, or simply goes into their account from which they often send money to the rest of the family or take on family expenses.

Five: No Quid Pro Quo

This doesn’t count as bribery in a legal sense because writing a letter of recommendation is not an “official act” according to 18 U.S. Code § 201 - Bribery of public officials and witnesses. If the money were paid for a veto, a vote, or some specific element of your political duties then you might be running afoul of the law, but since letters of recommendation are unofficial favors, they’re fair game.

Even if they were an official act, your Family Bagman insulates you from any accusation of quid pro quo because the Bagman is the one that received the wire transfer, not you, and you can always pretend to never have had any knowledge of the deal. In the very worst case that the deal became public, you can simply say your son or daughter is a wily businessperson who conned the recipient of the recommendation letter into paying for something you were going to give out for free anyway. And the recipient isn’t likely to rat you out because they got what they wanted out of the deal - their kid accepted to Brown University.

This is where your track record of giving out other letters of recommendation for free comes in. You can point to all the other free letters you wrote as evidence that you don’t charge for these things. If one or two letters-for-money ever come to light, that does not constitute a pattern of abuse of office, and therefore you’re free and clear of any quid-pro-quo claims.

Six: Profit

Once it’s up and running, you can probably pretty easily do one of these a month and stay well under the radar, perhaps banking twelve million dollars on this scheme alone over the course of a four year term of office. More if you want to push your luck and write more than one money letter per month. And if Fox News comes along and exposes the whole racket, just stick to Step Five and tell them you did nothing wrong.

Because in our system, you didn’t.