AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

“The Right’s Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections.” That’s the headline of a recent article by our next guest, David Sirota, editor-in-chief of The Lever. In the article, David writes about how two upcoming Supreme Court cases could turn the country into what he calls a kleptocracy. The article is based on Sirota’s new book, Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. David also has a new piece in The Nation on the New York mayoral race, “The Real Lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s Ascent.”

David Sirota, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off by talking about how you define the master plan? We talked to you when you did the series of podcasts on it, “the hidden plot to legalize corruption in America.”

DAVID SIROTA: So, we’re immersed in corruption. You see it in the headlines every day. And I think there’s this perception that this is a natural course of events, in the sense of it’s a force of nature. But what we unearth in the book, for the first time, really, ever, is the secret plan to make this kind of corruption that we’re immersed in legal, a plan hatched in the early 1970s to begin deregulating the campaign finance system and narrowing and making essentially unenforceable the anti-bribery laws in America.

It started with the Powell Memo. There was a lot of organizing — this memo written by a soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who urged a corporate investment and an oligarch investment in politics and media, because he was afraid and corporate America was afraid of the rising tide of consumer protection laws and the like. And out of that movement in the early 1970s came the movement to create court rulings and legal precedents equating money in politics not with corruption, but with constitutionally protected speech, giving corporations those constitutional rights to spend in elections and buy elections, ultimately culminating in Citizens United; meanwhile, a series of court rulings starting in the mid-2010s to overturn corruption convictions, to narrow the definition of bribery, leading up to now, as you alluded to in the intro, two cases at the Supreme Court, one spearheaded by Vice President JD Vance, to eliminate what is — what was left of campaign finance restrictions after Citizens United and to further reduce the definition of bribery to make, essentially, quid pro quo transactions in politics legal.

This is all part of a plan by a corporate movement that sees democracy — the government providing what people want — sees that as a threat and wants to turn the democracy from a one vote — a one-vote kind of democracy into a one-dollar kind of democracy, where money is the decider.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, why do you call it a secret plan, if it’s basically a class, or a group of people within a class, clearly operating in their own interests?

DAVID SIROTA: That’s certainly true. What we uncover in the book is, from the Powell Memo, this memo written by Lewis Powell, came never-before-revealed a series of meetings and task forces by the country’s most powerful people. We’re talking about executives at major media companies and Fortune 500 companies forming a task force to implement the Powell Memo’s demands that corporations invest in and essentially take over American politics.

What you saw in the 1970s into the '80s and ’90s was the implementation of what the Powell Memo had called for. And it was not revealed. It was all — much of it was done in secret. We're talking about investments in motion pictures. We’re talking about investments in media entities. We’re talking about strategizing for how to implement and put loopholes into campaign finance laws.

One of the first meetings that came out of the Powell Memo — let me give you one example — was a meeting at Disney World where they flew in Gerald Ford, who was soon to be the president, at a time when anti-corruption laws were moving through Congress after Watergate, and they ended up slipping in a loophole into that original campaign finance bill, which created the corporate PAC for the first time. And of course, from there, we get the rulings that I’ve just mentioned.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You also talk about the Mamdani campaign and a lot of the political pundits ascribing his success to his messaging and charisma, but you raise also the issue of how public financing of elections has made Mamdani’s success possible, as well. Can you talk about that?

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, to my mind, having worked on campaigns and having reported on political campaign finance, there’s this debate, right? Did Zohran Mamdani ascend because of his charisma, his slick ads, his message? I think all of those were factors, but I don’t think there really would be a Zohran Mamdani campaign without New York City’s system of publicly financed campaigns, a system that offers candidates like Zohran Mamdani, any qualifying candidates, matching funds, public matching funds, for their small donations.

So, we’ve seen a lot of oligarch money flow into the New York City mayor’s race. The reason Mamdani has been able to run a well-resourced campaign is because of that public financing system, which gives a candidate like him access to resources that don’t come with the demands of legislative favors. They are not private money donations that come from donors who want things from City Hall. So, Mamdani — that system has given Mamdani enough money not to outspend his opponents, but to at least run a competitive campaign.

And so, I think people looking at that race, wondering what the takeaways are for democracy, how can we have more outside-the-system candidates who can stand up to billionaires and oligarchs and the like, they should be looking at New York City’s public financing system as a replicable model in other cities and other states across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk, David Sirota, about all the latest news — for example, the pardons of the Binance CEO and what this means for the Trump family? You have President Trump last Thursday pardoning the convicted founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao. He pleaded guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering while he was CEO of Binance. According to The Wall Street Journal, Binance struck a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto startup, which has generated $4.5 billion since Trump returned to office. And then there’s a major Reuters exposé, the U.S. president’s family raking in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of this year alone. If you can explain how that fits into your description of a master plan?

DAVID SIROTA: For sure. I mean, this is really the culmination of it. Starting in the mid-2010s, there was a series of rulings. This is, if people remember, the Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell corruption case, where he was convicted, and the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court, intervened to overturn that conviction. That became the Chris Christie aides’ case, the Andrew Cuomo aides’ case, a bunch of corruption convictions that were overturned, culminating in last year’s decision where an Indiana mayor was convicted on corruption for delivering a government contract and then getting a payment from the contractor afterwards. That conviction corruption was overturned. The court said that it wasn’t bribery, it was a gratuity.

So, Trump is operating in a legal environment that has so narrowed down the definition of corruption to make it almost unprosecutable and unenforceable. So, I think when we look at stories of Donald Trump, his business dealings enriching himself through his position as president, we have to understand that they are knowingly operating inside of a legal environment that has made it almost impossible to prosecute bribery. And that was part of the plan to deregulate the campaign finance system and to reduce those bribery laws, because reducing those bribery laws and deregulating the campaign finance system essentially reduces the power of people. It rigs the democracy. How can Trump be held accountable if the highest court in the land essentially says that bribery is no longer a crime?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, could you talk about the intimidation, the changes in ownership in the major media companies to basically bring them under heel to this authoritarian government we have now?

DAVID SIROTA: I’m so glad you asked this. You know, one of the things that we uncovered, that was kind of, in a sense, shocking to me because it was so explicit, back when Lewis Powell wrote his memo in the early 1970s and there were these task forces about implementing the Powell Memo, some of the top executives at the largest media companies in the country participated in that endeavor to implement the Powell Memo. We unearthed a letter from CBS, CBS’s president at the time, saying not only did he agree with the Powell Memo’s directives and ideology, but that he was “working to correct the situation at CBS News.” That’s a direct quote. And so, I think have to look at what’s gone on with media consolidation. With Donald —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, David.

DAVID SIROTA: With Donald Trump, essentially, saying media mergers are predicated on his political ideology, we have to look at that as the culmination of the government trying to pressure — and successfully pressuring — media companies to do its bidding.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much, David, for being with us, David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, speaking to us from Denver, Colorado, co-author of Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Nicole Salazar, Sara Nasser, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for joining us.