Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rocky. Today we're talking about the Jack

Abramoff lobbying scandal and the similarities and differences between bribery schemes in the United

States and elsewhere.

My guest is Nathaniel Edmonds.

Nat is a partner with Paul Hastings in Washington, D.C., where he serves as the D.C. chair of the firm's litigation practice.

As a former assistant chief of the FCPA unit at the Department of Justice, he is well-positioned

now to focus on global internal investigations, specializing in anti-corruption

matters and the challenges arising from multi-jurisdictional investigations into complex economic

crime. Nat, thank you for joining me. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. You spent the early

part of your career working on the corruption cases around Jack Abramoff in Washington, D.C.

Let's start there and then take advantage of your international experience to do a sort of survey of corruption schemes.

But for our listeners outside the United States, or for those who weren't paying enough attention a decade ago,

can you walk us through the details of

what is probably the best-known Washington lobbying scandal? The Jack Abramoff cases were a series of

fraud and corruption cases that occurred in the early 2000s, focusing on a number of lobbyists,

executive branch officials, congressional officials, and some

Congresspeople that were involved in various allegations of corruption and then also fraud.

So the initial investigation started on lobbyists defrauding their clients of over $20 million.

And then it morphed into an investigation into the lobbying practices of some of the leading

lobbyist firms in Washington, D.C. at the time.

Jack Abramoff was a high-profile lobbyist who handled a number of different matters, both for

Native American Indian tribes, as well as for a number of multinational companies on a variety of

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