Private Politics (The Easy Part) Read Free Page A

always resisted; the woman was stuck in the past.
    As she plugged numbers into her spreadsheet, she noticed a lot of medium-sized donations from businesses incorporated in Delaware. Okay, so that was hardly unusual, many businesses were, it was just that she didn’t recognize the names on many of them.
    Usually, contributions of any size came from foundations she knew well. It wasn’t like the past few years had been good ones for American businesses, like they suddenly had all this excess cash that needed to be given away.
    When she plugged one of the unfamiliar names—Harding Investment Group—into a search engine, she found the group’s website. A little cheap-looking, but still, legit. At the next, Alyse sucked in her breath.
    R. Cross LLC’s site was identical to Harding Investment Group’s. Only the banner at the top was different. She clicked the “about” tab.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
...
    Her high school Latin might be inaccessible, but that was the dummy text that appeared on a website template until you put something else in. She checked the copyright at the bottom of the page; it was dated from three months prior, around the time of the donation.
    This...wasn’t right. Why couldn’t a company that had enough money to give YWR $10,000 not afford a real web designer? Why would they still have the filler text up? What was going on?
    The back of her neck tingled; she glanced over her shoulder. No one was there, of course. Her colleagues were all long gone.
    Feeling a bit self-conscious, she scooped up the binders and headed for the copy room. She duplicated the pages for each donation she couldn’t remember, all the ones that seemed fishy, and returned the originals to storage.
    They had definitely been receiving more corporate money than in the past. Much of it came from groups with names like Harding Investment Group and R. Cross LLC rather than the big, well-known foundations, the ones who funded shows on public television and conducted their business out in the open.
    No, the increase in corporate money coincided with YWR spending a lot more money on lobbying—most of it going to Ryan Scott—the lobbyist who was their go-between with the Foreign Affairs and Appropriations committees.
    Alyse tapped her fingers on her desk, appreciating the press of the wood. Ryan’s relationship with Geri already raised the hackles of a lot of people around the office. Were the two of them together? Was that even appropriate? But he did a good job and nobody really
knew
if anything was going on, so nothing got said.
    Lobbyists, and the shadow government they were part of, controlled the money in Washington—that
everyone
knew. The money was obvious. Wolf Blitzer talked about it on CNN. Candidates were asked about it during presidential debates. Reports were produced and hands were wringed about the money.
    But the money was a red herring. What really mattered was that lobbyists controlled the information. Members of Congress and even their staffers tended not to understand the minutiae of the issues they worked on. They often left the little details, which was to say the text of bills, up to lobbyists. Once someone had cache with a committee and its staff, he could influence—control, even—legislation.
    But even if Geri and Ryan were together, even if Ryan were exerting a little too much power in the Foreign Affairs Committee, what were dummy corporations doing giving YWR money? What did the money represent?
    There was no way around it, what she was looking at seemed
bad
. Not like a little bad. Not like accepting a venti latte when you knew you’d only paid for a grande bad. No, really, potentially illegally bad.
    She flipped through the pages again and again and trying to figure out how to explain what she was seeing, but nothing came to mind. She shoved the papers into her purse and almost ran from the building.
    Outside, there wasn’t any comfort. March in Washington, DC, was not the prettiest month. The