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A quibble, but just under a century if you mean "since Teapot Dome", which was 1921-23.
More seriously, it is only the biggest bribery scandal because we don't know what Jared Kushner did for the $300 million or so the Saudis are bunging him ($300mm is my best guess of the management fee he will be getting on the $2 billion investment in his PE fund). The Jack Abramoff scandal is also bigger than Hunter in terms of dollar amount and had sympathetic victims, but it isn't clear it counts as a bribery scandal (Abramoff was prosecuted for bilking the Indian tribes who hired his lobbying firm).
My view is that the worst US bribery scandal in recent years would be the Clinton-era Chinese campaign contributions. Biden isn't accused of doing anything nearly as bad as turning a blind eye to Chinese nuclear espionage in exchange for the money.
Hunter had office space had Joe on the lease with a CCP operative. Less proven than the Burisma stuff but the Bidens seem to have been getting bribed by the Chinese too.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/14/hunter-biden-office-mates-joe-chinese-business-associate-emails-show/
End of the day every thing assumed ends up being true so ya Bidens were probably selling secrets/access to China against American interests knowingly.
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The Saudis are throwing money at a lot of people. I have a friends dad who’s a former big exec on their payroll too.
I think we do know what Kush did. The worst interpretation was helping with pressure from Kashoggi. The best would be they worked with him on the Abraham Accords which I don’t know anyone who thinks they were bad or against American interests. The Kashoggi stuff has been American foreign policy for decades of looking the other way as long as the Saudi gas station stays open. And Biden has stayed allied with them.
I hate Kush for taking their money. His background is fine for being the face guy for a pe firm. And I think he could have raised the money in more traditional routes. High ranking administration officials do get those sort of gigs. Rahm was a well paid investment banker. Peter Orszag popped up recently as the CEO of Lazard.
$300 million could be right. Tough to know. I’d assume 2 and 20. So $40 million a year in management fees and most pe firms want 2.5 CAC return goal so if he hits that’s would be $3 billion in profits or $600 million to the firm. But of course he needs to invest well and pay his people.
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I am positive Kush is getting 2&20. 2% mgmt fee and then carry of 20%. So if he got 2b in funds mgmt fee would be 40m. The real money is in the carry but that requires doing successful deals.
I estimated $300m based on $40m per year over the life of the fund, which is usually 5 or 7 years, plus a conservative estimate of the carry on the assumption that Kushner is a mediocre investor.
The carry is a free option (the fund manager gets paid if the fund beats the hurdle, but keeps the 2% fee if it doesn't) and if Kushner just invested in the S&P500 the Black-Scholes EV of the carry would be about $26 million. With some reasonable assumptions about using leverage to add volatility, I get numbers in the $100-150 million range.
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