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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Also apparently the secretary of state can just wave the fee?

Sounds like it's just corruption as a service.

Darn if only we had some way of knowing a presidential candidate was corrupt. Like if they were charged with multiple felonies for corruption. Or if they were impeached twice for corruption.

If only the judiciary and house had literally any credibility that people wouldn't suspect the whole thing was politically motivated voters might actually care. At least as far as i can tell they remained magnificently indifferent.

Or if they take hundreds of millions from "special" lobbyists to enable land grabs overseas

One can wonder how people like DPR or that Nikola guy got pardoned. I'm pretty sure that the President didn't know about all those people until some aide or a relative brought it up. Now, how to make such an aide or a relative to bring it up before the President? May it help to pay $5M to join one of those lunches at Mar-a-Lago where one can meet such an aide or a relative and drop the name of somebody so deserving a Presidential pardon?

DPR's pardoning was the administration throwing a bone to libertarian influencers who campaigned for his release.

I’m sure the inspectors general will keep an eye out for this. It would be very bad for the reputation of the administration to have blatant corruption at the top levels.

I assume your reply is sarcastic, but just in case, I'll say it directly: this administration does not care whether there is blatant corruption at the top levels, or any other levels for that matter. I'm fact, insofar as it antagonizes liberals, they'll encourage it.

One of the first things the Trump admin did was fire a lot of the inspectors general, including the one for the State Department.

I'd assume the reply you are replying to is being sarcastic specifically in reference to that event.

There's currently an (Acting) IG for State as a replacement, but I think its pretty clear how long that job would last for him if he were to actually do it.

Thank you for reminding me of the IG firings!

> Thank you for reminding me of the IG firings!

No problem.

With all of the crazy "flooding the zone" things that have happened since it seems like it was like ~9 years ago rather than ~9 months ago.

> sure the inspectors general will keep an eye out for this

The dude who runs Homeland Security accepted bags of cash from the FBI [1]. (The case is being dropped. For good and bad reasons.)

Meanwhile, DOJ prosecutors are being fired for not following partisan marching orders [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/tom-homan-fbi...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/trump-justice...

Indeed. They'll use this to hurt companies they want to hurt.

Also trap the companies that are their "friends".

Trump isn't above cutting a deal and altering it and continuously making demands.

Corruption-as-a-service is a feature, not a bug, of this administration. And it works across immigration, technology, crypto, etc.

Sounds worse. The big companies won't have a problem and anyway can afford it. Smaller industries will have a much harder time getting attention.

To be frank the H1b scheme seems slightly dodgy to me anyway. But i only learned about it 30 minutes ago.

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