Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, windle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge.

Today we're talking about the Crook Act.

That's the Countering Russian and Other Overseas Hleptocracy Act,

a bipartisan initiative that would create a fund to address corruption overseas.

This idea originated back in 2018 with today's guest, Abigail Bellows.

For purposes of today's podcast, Abigail is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace, but she is also an independent consultant on governance, civil

society, and foreign policy topics.

Prior to her current role,

she served her five years at the U.S. Department of State, where she designed and led the anti-corruption portfolio in the office of the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

Abigail, thank you for joining me today. Pleasure to be here. You are doing really good, smart work in this field, and this is your brain child.

So why don't you walk us through the original idea and then where things stand now, two years later?

Over the past several years, there's been a rise in public mobilization on corruption issues.

And that's likely to pick up again as the lockdowns ease and the scale of diversion in some countries from the pandemic comes to light.

Across the world, we're seeing citizens challenging and renegotiating social contracts that are built

on stealing public funds. So just as an example of the kind of scale of that

civic mobilization, in the past three years alone, corruption scandals have sparked mass protest in 32

countries. So this is a pretty widespread phenomenon. And sometimes these civic mobilizations

lead to political transitions, such as in Guatemala in 2015

or Armenia in 2018.

Around the world, we've seen 10% of countries experience corruption-fueled political change

...