Editorials of The Times

The special counsel, Robert Mueller, has not yet presented evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian agents to subvert the 2016 election. But he has already provided an instructive guide to the swampy world of corporations, law firms and Washington lobbying shops, and to how a tough prosecutor can bring some measure of justice to bear.

The bank- and tax-fraud indictment of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for instance, lifted a rock on manipulation that’s usually hidden.

Alex van der Zwaan, a former lawyer with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, was sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to Mueller’s investigators about his conversations with Manafort’s associate Rick Gates about a Ukrainian businessman believed to be a Russian intelligence operative.

Wait, you say, Skadden Arps? One of the top law firms in the country? How did they get caught up in this?

It turns out that the firm was among the beneficiaries of $4 million in largesse that Manafort and Gates distributed several years ago in their efforts as “lobbyists” to promote the Moscow-backed regime that then controlled Ukraine. No less a luminary than the Skadden Arps partner Gregory Craig — who had been White House counsel for President Barack Obama — oversaw a report the firm commissioned that called the government’s prosecution of a dissident flawed but appropriate.

The Obama State Department called that report flawed and inappropriate. “Skadden Arps lawyers were obviously not going to find political motivation if they weren’t looking for it,” a department spokeswoman said. Last year the firm returned $567,000 to a new Ukrainian government, now unencumbered by Moscow ties.

The indictment also revealed that Manafort enlisted the help of the Democratic superlobbyist Tony Podesta and his firm, the Podesta Group, to promote the corrupt former Ukrainian regime, even though Podesta did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The ensuing publicity helped destroy Podesta’s firm.

One Washington lawyer told The New York Times that this scrutiny raised concerns about the registration law and “a new emphasis on enforcement that perhaps folks didn’t think was happening or would happen.”

There’s a novel thought: enforcing laws on white collar crime.

Take the extensive money laundering Manafort is accused of undertaking with shell companies that hide ownership. How could he have expected to get away with it?

Perhaps he saw what happened when one of the world’s largest banks, HSBC, helped launder billions of dollars in drug proceeds for the Sinaloa cartel, for a financier for al-Qaida and for others over nearly a decade. When they were caught, they only had to forfeit less than five weeks of profit. No bank employee was criminally charged.

Now consider the potential big fish in the special counsel’s investigation. Three years ago, about three months before Trump announced his candidacy for president, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network fined the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City $10 million for “willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act” for failing to report suspicious transactions and failing to properly file currency transaction reports and keep proper records. The officials noted that the casino had “a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003.” The casino had been fined $477,700 in 1998. In other words, Trump’s casino helped launder money and no one was charged with a crime.

One-fifth of the condos owned by Trump in the United States were sold to shell companies like those Manafort used, BuzzFeed News found. Since Trump won the Republican nomination, 70 percent of domestic real estate sales by his companies were to shell companies, USA Today has reported.

A Times investigation found that this sort of behavior is business as usual for many big developers, as shell companies with untraceable funds — not all with nefarious purposes — buy a disproportionate number of high-end condos in cities like New York. Nor is this simply a problem for global urban centers.A shell company obscured the purchase of a lobbyist’s luxurious home by the beleaguered administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, when he was an Oklahoma state senator in 2003.

The recent attention to Trump’s “personal attorney” Michael Cohen illuminated another not uncommon practice of the business world. One of Cohen’s specialties was keeping people quiet. He made hush money payments to the women in Trump’s life, including arranging for The National Enquirer to make “catch and kill” payments for the rights to salacious stories that were then never published.

The Associated Press reported that after it found out that The Enquirer paid $30,000 to a doorman who said that Trump had fathered a child with one of his housekeepers, the paper’s parent company threatened AP with legal action.

Were those lawyers associates of the louche Cohen? Nope, they were from the firm of the legal paragon David Boies, who defended same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court and fought for Al Gore in the Florida recount debacle in 2000. Boies also worked to try to kill a New York Times report on women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and, as counsel to the fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos, threatened to sue The Wall Street Journal to prevent a report that showed the company was a complete con. A “good guy” in a bad cause — business as usual. (Boies’ firm did work for the Times Co. until The New Yorker reported that the firm had arranged what Times officials called “a secret spying operation aimed at our reporting and our reporters” on the Weinstein story.)

Amid all the tawdry allegations in the Cohen affair, the president would have us believe he is holding high the banner of a sacred principle — attorney-client privilege. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan was able to overcome the privilege and seize documents from Cohen after persuading a judge that evidence showed he had committed a crime, and was not just giving legal advice.

In the world of white-collar crime, though, business as usual has meant that the attorney-client privilege has often been a means to keep the law at bay. Companies have long used the privilege to shield information about misconduct. For some years in the George W. Bush administration federal prosecutors cut deals in which companies waived the privilege. After a lobbying campaign by businesses and an adverse court ruling, though, the Justice Department barred the practice.

All this is an indictment of a criminal justice system that has fed the swamp in which Trump and his ilk thrive. Industrial-level fraud by America’s banks nearly brought the world economy to its knees in 2008, and no senior executive was even charged. This past week, with $1 billion in new federal penalties for Wells Fargo, we were reminded that nobody has been hauled into court over a range of its sleazy practices one would expect from a boiler-room scam, not the nation’s third-largest bank.

In his book “The Chickenshit Club” — named for how James Comey, then a U.S. attorney, referred to prosecutors who never lost a case because they avoided ones they might not win — Jesse Eisinger documents how the Department of Justice has “lost the will and indeed the ability to go after the highest-ranking corporate wrongdoers.”

Mueller is showing prosecutors a better way to deal with white-collar crime.

It may seem unfair to single out South Africa for its corruption. It’s not the worst offender in sub-Saharan Africa, and far from the worst in the world — India, China and Russia rank far worse on the Transparency International list, and South Africa has functioning democratic institutions and a lively press. But countries should be measured less against the rest of the world than against their own potential and promise, and on that score, the same African National Congress that Nelson Mandela led to a triumphant victory over apartheid a quarter century ago has become gorged on corruption.

What is particularly galling, as Norimitsu Onishi and Selam Gebrekidan reported in The New York Times, is that so many of the millions filched from state coffers were earmarked to lift up the poor left behind by apartheid. While politically connected companies and individuals have grown wealthy, the gap between them and the poor, most of them blacks, has only grown. A recent report by the World Bank and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development found that despite some progress since the end of apartheid, South Africa remains “one of the most unequal countries in the world.”

The potential for change was evident when the ANC finally forced President Jacob Zuma out of office in February. Zuma’s nine years in office were a byword for obscene corruption, and he now faces corruption, racketeering, fraud and money laundering charges. His successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, promised in his first state-of-the-nation address that “this is the year in which we will turn the tide of corruption in our public institutions.” Yet Ramaphosa is himself a veteran ANC member and made a fortune largely through his ties to the party, and his Cabinet includes officials who stand accused of corruption.

Mandela may have been partly responsible for the state of affairs when he struck a grand bargain with the white minority that finally gave the black majority control over politics but left many economic resources in the hands of whites. That, according to current perceptions cited in The Times article, created incentives to give and receive bribes.

Yet while the flawed transition may explain the rise of corruption, it cannot justify the perfidy of officials who were reared on the ideals and aspirations of the movement Mandela led. The corruption described by Onishi and Gebrekidan is not simply bribery, but rather elaborate schemes to siphon off tens of billions of public dollars intended to improve the lives of the very people the ANC promised to lead to a new, equal and just nation.

That is one reason that it is fair to single out South Africa. Another is that the “beloved country” of Alan Paton’s South African classic has the democratic tools to combat the blight of corruption, as the unfolding case against Zuma demonstrates. The question is whether Ramaphosa or the ANC are any longer capable of wielding them.