The word “hypocrisy,” as we’ve had occasion to remark in this space before, is among the most misused and abused terms in American politics—which, given the state of our discourse, is saying something. Generally missing in attributions of hypocrisy is the essential element of secrecy or furtiveness. The hypocrite doesn’t just contradict himself or hold views thought by someone to be contradictory; the hypocrite says one thing in public but does something quite different in private.
On Monday, we were given several choice instances of genuine, undiluted hypocrisy—all of them revelations from the so-called Paradise Papers, a collection of 13 million electronic records leaked on November 5 to the German newspaper Süddeutche Zeitung and shared with the New York Times. The leaked records are mostly from the Bermuda-based law firm Appleby. They reveal dizzyingly complicated financial relationships whose beneficiaries would rather keep them secret—hence the involvement of offshore banks and offshore law firms—but don’t indicate much in the way of illegality. Mainly what they reveal is hypocrisy.
The first case involves Wilbur Ross, the current secretary of Commerce. Despite divesting many assets in order to take the cabinet post, Ross retained ownership in a shipping company called Navigator, which does extensive business with a petrochemical company called Sibur, which in turn has so many ties to the Kremlin that it’s almost fair to call it an arm of the Russian government—Sibur’s owners include Vladimir Putin’s judo partner and Putin’s son-in-law.
What strikes us about this revelation is not the fact that Ross didn’t disclose his ownership of Navigator (he disclosed his ownership of the holding company that invests in Navigator). Nor is there anything necessarily wrong with the relationship itself—Ross seems to have broken no law, even if the nature of the financial tie will create a lot of political trouble for the administration. No; the problem with the revelation of Ross’s finances—and the Paradise Papers reveal similar dealings on the part of the president’s chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, and secretary of state, Rex Tillerson—is the sheer stunning hypocrisy of it all. Team Trump alleges itself to be a “populist” administration, a champion of the people’s will and not of the elites’ interests. Yet its top officials own holding companies in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, where the tax laws governing the rest of us don’t apply.
The other case is culturally rather than politically important. We learn from the leaked records that the venture capitalist Yuri Milner, whose investments earned the Russian-born entrepreneur ownership of 5 percent of Twitter and more than 8 percent of Facebook, received hundreds of millions of dollars from Gazprom, the state-owned Russian natural gas company. Milner argues that money is fungible, which is true, and a Facebook spokeswoman calls Milner’s investment company a “passive investor,” whatever that means, but the leaked documents make it reasonably clear that Gazprom put up the money specifically for an investment in Facebook.
So after several years of Facebook’s founder and corporate officers brandishing their left-liberal credentials, we learn their company was propped up in part by Kremlin cash. Only last week Facebook attorneys, speaking to the Senate Intelligence committee, defended the company against criticisms that it allowed Russian-linked accounts buying millions of dollars’ worth of ads promoting jingoistic and otherwise incendiary causes. Of course, the Russian government doesn’t fund private business ventures in foreign countries simply to make money, or to fund innovation. It does so to further the Kremlin’s aims. If we’re to believe that Facebook’s progressive executives weren’t conflicted between Russian money and Russian political meddling, they’d better explain themselves far better than they have so far.
If it’s true, as La Rochefoucauld says, that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, today’s newsmakers must think a lot of virtue.
