America is not an exception when it comes to countries that have corrupt politicians who are consistently violating their position and the law for private gain, and if you are interested to see who are the most corrupt politicians in US history, you are in the right place.
Now before we move on, let’s just clarify what falls under the term corruption. As you may, or may not know, there are many different forms of corruption starting from bribery, embezzlement, cronyism, extortion, patronage, parochialism to nepotism among other types. Many politicians and people who have similar job positions are often using the law to fill their bank accounts while they still can. However, since the laws vary from one country to another, it is often difficult to distinguish legal from illegal.
There are many ways of how a corrupted country is hampering the economic development. Corruption is stealing the wealth of the nation, and it is impoverishing its people. The economic growth rate is depending on the corruption rate, the higher the corruption rate is in one country, the lower its economic growth will be. Corruption affects one country not only by reducing the investment and the economic growth as we already mentioned, but also by providing poor maintenance of public infrastructure and by reducing foreign direct investment.
The United States had 45 presidents including the newly elected Donald Trump. Not all of them were perfect, and not all of them contributed to the country as they promised during their presidential campaigns. There are a lot of presidents for whom it wasn’t obvious to the ordinary people that they were corrupted, or there was simply no evidence of their corruption. If you want to learn more about corrupted presidents, make sure to read our list of Most Corrupt US Presidents in History. The most common frauds all of the politicians and the presidents made were bribery, extortion, and racketeering.
While creating our list of most corrupt politicians in US history, we used Real Clear History, CNBC, and Warped Speed as our sources to see what are the most corrupted politicians. In order to create our list, after we collected the information from our sources, we took the politicians that were mentioned the most times in our sources. After we finished this step, we sorted our list by the number of mentions. Now let’s get down to the list and see who are the most corrupt politicians in US history.