Stings after ABSCAM

Operation Greylord in Chicago used honest judges and lawyers posing as crooked ones; 92 officials were indicted, including 17 judges, and nearly all were convicted. [1] South Carolina’s Operation Lost Trust in 1990 used a lobbyist working with the FBI to pay legislators over a betting bill.

Tennessee Waltz (2005) was ABSCAM with a different costume: FBI agents set up a fake electronics company and paid legislators to help it. A dozen state and local officials were convicted or pleaded guilty. [2] New Jersey’s Bid Rig (2009) charged 44 people, including the mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield, after a cooperating developer, Solomon Dwek, himself facing bank-fraud charges, paid bribes on tape. Some defendants were acquitted. Dwek got six years for his own $50 million fraud. [3][4]

In 2005 Representative William Jefferson was recorded taking cash; $90,000 was later found in his freezer. His 2009 conviction was cut back after the Supreme Court narrowed the meaning of an “official act” in 2016. [5]

These cases share ABSCAM’s strengths and its risk: a cooperator with his own legal problems, choosing whom to approach.

P.G. Sittenfeld, a Democratic Cincinnati councilman and mayoral front-runner, took $20,000 in checks for his political action committee from FBI agents posing as developers who wanted help with a project. In July 2022 a jury convicted him of one count of federal-program bribery and one of attempted extortion and acquitted him of the others. [1]

His defense was the line ABSCAM also tested: politicians take campaign money from people who want things all the time, so when does a contribution become a bribe? The Sixth Circuit affirmed 2–1 in February 2025, but even the majority said the Supreme Court’s McCormick and Evans line was blurry and that it “may be time” for the Court to revisit it. [1]

On 28 May 2025 President Trump granted Sittenfeld a full pardon. [2]

The comparison works because Sittenfeld’s case was about the line between access and a deal, which is the line ABSCAM forced juries to draw. It differs because ABSCAM members took cash, not checks to a PAC.

People who distrust FBI stings often line ABSCAM up beside the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and the January 6 Capitol attack. The common thread they see is informants and agents shaping a crime.

In the Whitmer case, FBI informants and agents were deep inside the group. Juries took the entrapment argument seriously: in April 2022 one jury acquitted two defendants, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta. At a retrial, Adam Fox and Barry Croft were convicted and sentenced to about 16 and 19.5 years. In 2025 the Sixth Circuit affirmed and rejected their entrapment claims. [1]

On January 6, the DOJ inspector general found in December 2024 that the FBI had 26 confidential sources in Washington that day; three had been tasked to be there, four entered the Capitol and another 13 entered restricted areas around it. None was authorized to enter the Capitol or to encourage anyone to break the law, and the inspector general found no undercover FBI employees in the crowd. [2]

Those are real questions about informants. They are not ABSCAM, which was a bribery offer to sitting officials with a script written by the government.