Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. We're speaking today about

how to approach corruption and kleptocracy from a policy perspective. My guest is Josh Rudolph.

Josh is the fellow from Align Finance of the Alliance for Securing Democracy

at the German Marshall Fund. He's a widely published expert on the financial channels that

enable autocratic efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions. Josh,

thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, Alexandra. I'm a longtime listenertime listener, first-time call us, so it's an honor

for me. Thank you. You recently wrote in foreign affairs that, and I'll quote,

if Biden wants to make progress against corruption, he needs to push his Treasury Department to get

with the program. Is it your sense that Biden is going to prioritize anti-corruption?

I think we've already seen some of that, but do you expect that to continue to increase?

And what about, and this is going to get to the crux of the matter, the role of Treasury?

We have seen some.

And I mean, we started to see Biden's priority around this as a candidate more than a year ago

when he had his foreign affairs piece that set out his agenda or the broad strokes of it,

the three areas for the summit for democracy that he will be hosting within his first year

in office.

And anti-corruption is one of the three pillars

and maybe even the most important because the one that he said, you know, the U.S. deliverable

is going to be a presidential policy directive signaling the importance of it as a national

security matter and democratic responsibility. He gets it deep in his bones the importance of this issue.

These are my views alone, but I can say having worked with him in the Obama White House on international economics, especially around Ukraine,

he knows more than any other American political figure about how important this is.

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