In an indictment unsealed Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) for seeking and accepting “improper valuable benefits,” including “luxury international travel” and “illegal campaign contributions,” from the Turkish government. Adams pleaded not guilty on Friday. The story is prominent because the subject leads the nation’s largest city, but the background is far more disturbing.

The American judicial system assumes that all accused persons are innocent until proven guilty, and Adams enjoys that presumption as much as former President Donald Trump. Adams has protested his innocence and argued that the Biden-Harris administration has targeted him for criticizing its immigration policy. He backed away from his predecessor’s policy of declaring New York a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants, but on other issues, such as abortion, Adams has governed as a typical progressive.

However, it doesn’t seem like the DOJ had invented this scheme out of thin air. The federal investigation into Adams has been ongoing for some time. Last year, the FBI raided the home of Adams’s chief fundraiser. In July, they subpoenaed records of Adams’s travel. In September, authorities seized the phones of five high-ranking city officials, triggering a series of resignations from his administration. Prosecutors announced Monday they are also investigating Adams’s financial ties to Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea, and Uzbekistan.

The federal indictment alleges that Adams accepted bribes “for nearly a decade,” from the time when he became Brooklyn Borough President in 2014. After winning reelection in 2018, Adams successfully ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 on a platform of fighting crime amid the post-COVID crime spike. However, the DOJ alleges that Adams’s campaign for mayor was boosted in illegal campaign contributions from foreign governments, laundered through “straw” donors to make the donations appear legitimate.

In other words, if the indictment is correct, a foreign government began cultivating Adams as an asset years before he held an office of international importance. The foreign government then secretly boosted Adams’s campaign for higher office. American voters were unaware that the apparently popular politician they voted into a high position of trust had his sails full of foreign donations, manufactured to look like he had raised millions from small-dollar donors.

Even more concerning is what could have happened if the alleged scheme had continued. A mayor’s ability to repay favors for foreign governments is limited to relatively small matters such as approving permits for their consulate. But, if Turkish contributions bankrolled a successful mayoral campaign, what would prevent them from bankrolling a successful run for a higher office — governor, senator, or perhaps even president after that?

Whether or not Adams is convicted of these charges, the indictment points to a greater concern: other government officials may similarly be compromised by foreign governments, without Americans being any wiser. “In the end, a whole lot of people inside and outside of government are for sale,” reflected National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “And foreign governments are often the highest bidder.”

There is plenty of other evidence that foreign governments are seeking to infiltrate the U.S. government, whether by compromising public officials or by having operatives infiltrate their orbits. Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was convicted in July for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt — while he sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife were indicted in May for taking bribes from the government of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.

In early September, the FBI arrested Linda Sun, a top aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) and previously an aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), on Chinese espionage charges. In January 2023, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was removed from the House Intelligence Committee due to his close connections to another Chinese spy.

Foreign governments don’t just target government officials, and they don’t just target Democrats. Several weeks ago, the DOJ indicted two Russian operatives in a $10 million scheme to direct a right-wing media outlet, Tenet Media, to publish pro-Russian narratives. The personalities on that media network claimed they were duped, but the owners of the media company allegedly knew they were working for Russia.

At the very least, these various incidents underscore the fact that foreign governments hostile to the United States both desire and attempt to cultivate operatives and assets within the U.S. government. “Those bribes were offered because what those politicians and officials could do was worth the cost to those foreign governments,” Geraghty reasoned. They pursue a wide variety of strategies to cultivate assets in the U.S. government. If the Adams indictment is correct, foreign governments are even willing to play the long game, bestowing favors on low-level politicians and then increasing their hold over them as they help them climb the political ladder.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) argued in a letter last month that China may be pursuing a similar strategy with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. According to the footnote-dense letter, Walz has visited China an estimated 30 times, dating back to a 1993 trip, when Walz was a schoolteacher. That trip was paid for by the Chinese government.

Walz then coordinated and led annual student trips to China for a decade, under a private company he set up, which “was reportedly dissolved four days after he took congressional office in 2007,” noted Comer. The letter went on to detail other concerning but circumstantial information. While in Congress, Walz “served as a fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University, a Chinese institution that characterizes itself as having a ‘long held devotion to and love for the motherland.’” In 2019, he “headlined the 27th National Convention for the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association, in the state of Minnesota,” alongside the president of an organization the State Department later “exposed as ‘a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments.’”

The purpose of Comer’s letter was to request further information from the FBI about Walz’s connections to China. Comer stated in September that the FBI — which would never, ever, do anything to influence a political election — “failed to provide any response to the Committee” by the August 30 deadline.

This exchange highlights another way the American system is vulnerable to foreign influence operations. The widespread distribution of power provides many opportunities for unscrupulous individuals to obtain at least enough power to do harm. Once in positions of power, compromised officials can use that power to cover their own tracks, and they have a powerful financial (not to mention political) incentive do so.

Speaking of powerful political officials taking gifts from foreign governments and then using their position to cover their tracks, the Biden family earned at least $27 million in foreign deals while Joe Biden was vice president, according to a House impeachment report released in August after months of stonewalling by the administration. “President Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift,” the report alleged. Sometimes political officials initiate their own compromising situations with foreign governments.