Mr. President, I rise today to sound the alarm on the national security threat that corruption represents and to echo the determination made earlier this year by President Biden that corruption…
Mr. President, I rise today to sound the alarm on the national security threat that corruption represents and to echo the determination made earlier this year by President Biden that corruption constitutes a core national security threat to the United States.
Along with many colleagues in this body, I have worked long and hard to fight corruption--which undermines democracy, human rights, and the rule of law and is behind so many of the persistent problems that we seek to solve.
The recently released Pandora Papers investigations--coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and involving 150 media outlets, including The Washington Post and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project--reveal the astonishing extent to which questionable financial flows are entering our country and those of our allies. This warrants further review. Although we had known that such a system of offshore finance exists, it is still shocking to see the scale of the corruption, documented in great detail by emails, contracts, and other documents. Foreign dictators, their associates, and other foreign officials have stolen untold sums-- billions of dollars--and moved that dirty money into our democracies, into real estate, bank accounts, trusts, and other financial instruments.
This is a profound threat to our national security. It hollows out the rule of law abroad and now it threatens to hollow out the rule of law at home.
Foreign kleptocrats cannot do this alone. Although kleptocrats may steal abroad, to taint our political system with that money requires the assistance of enablers--American lawyers, accountants, trust, and company service providers, real estate professionals, and the like--who put aside any moral qualms they may have about working for the enemies of democracy to obtain a small slice of the illgotten gains.
The Pandora Papers make clear that U.S. enablers apparently play an outsized role in helping to move stolen assets from dictatorships and struggling democracies into consolidated democracies--an appalling and corrupt transference of wealth from those who need it most to those who have no need at all.
All told, the papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 States and Washington, DC, and 22 trustee companies. While there is obviously much legitimate business to be done in creating and managing trusts and investments--and we should be careful about overstating or generalizing without careful examination of each case--it appears that some Americans may have knowingly played a significant role in facilitating corruption.
The papers include 300 politicians and public officials from more than 90 countries and territories--though no Americans and exceedingly few Western Europeans. This comes as no surprise. The movement of corrupt money runs east to west, not west to east. It is the tragedy of the post-Cold War world that corruption has come west along with dirty money rather than democracy going east. There are names in the papers that also come as no surprise--Putin cronies Konstantin Ernst and Gennady Timchenko are both named. Both are included on Alexey Navalny's list of 35 human rights abusers and kleptocrats. Timchenko is already under U.S. sanctions, though Ernst is not. Now would be a good time to consider sanctions on him.
The Aliyevs of Azerbaijan also make an appearance. They collectively own a real estate empire in London worth $700 million. A Chinese Communist Party official also was found to have used an offshore company to trade in U.S. stocks.
However, there is good news. It does not have to be this way. The triumph of global kleptocracy is not inevitable. We can fight back, and we are. Never before has there been an American administration so focused on the countering corruption or a Congress so creative and aggressive in facing down the threat. President Biden is the first President ever to declare countering corruption to be a ``core U.S. national security interest.'' Congress has formed a Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy. The House recently passed no fewer than six different counterkleptocracy measures in the National Defense Authorization Act, which included bills of mine. Now it is incumbent upon us in the Senate to do the same.
First is the Combating Global Corruption Act that would create a public and tiered country-by-country reporting requirement on compliance with international anti-corruption norms and standards. Those countries in the lowest tier of this report would have their leadership evaluated for Global Magnitsky sanctions.
Then there is the Global Magnitsky reauthorization that would reauthorize and enhance these critical sanctions for targeting global kleptocrats and human rights abusers--exactly the sort of people identified in the Pandora Papers. I am also proposing a new measure-- and I am introducing it today--that would mandate the administration evaluate the ``Navalny 35'' for Global Magnitsky sanctions. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, in a letter addressed to President Joe Biden earlier this year, called for the United States to impose sanctions on dozens of Russian oligarchs and government officials, whom it credibly accuses of political persecution, human rights abuses, and corruption. I agree with the Navalny team and urge the administration to move forward on this.
All three of these measures have been included in the House National Defense Authorization Act, and I urge my colleagues to include them in the Senate National Defense Authorization Act.
The Pandora Papers are a wake-up call to all who care about the future of democracy. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, it is time for democracies to band together and demand an end to the unprecedented corruption that has come to be the defining feature of the global order. We must purge the dirty money from our systems and deny kleptocrats safe haven.
It will take hard decisions and difficult reforms, but we can do it. We already have the bipartisan momentum. Now we only have to see it through.
