Illegal government activity in the US

Secret meetings with a lobbyist, or most anybody else for that matter, is not illegal.
Blackmailing the US government would be difficult, if not impossible. The US government does not negotiate with terrorists and a blackmailer would most likely be considered a terrorist.
You're much better off picking the right government agent and then blackmailing that individual to get what you want. Individuals make many mistakes, and those who are higher up in the government usually gain a superiority complex and think the rules don't apply to them. Then they start tweeting pictures of their body parts to young women. So, it's pretty easy to find a way to blackmail them.

Do you mean blackmailing the ENTIRE US government or specific people in it?

Lobbyists work all the time in Washington and are known for wining and dining Congressmen on behalf of a wide range of issues. They also meet with Congressmen all the time and donate money to their campaigns. It's not a great system and many people don't like it, but it's kind of expected.

Your scenario would work, though, if the lobbyists were sketchy or their bribes went beyond the normal free dinners, golf outings, vacations, etc. The lobbyists could have ties to organized crime (Italian, Russian, Mexican cartels, etc.)? Or they could pay for large personal expenses, such as a house or kids' college tuition, etc. Or they could have some evil purpose, like secretly pushing to expand the NSA's intel gathering powers. Or paying off FDA officials to approve potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals without the required clinical testing.

But the government officials directly involved with the lobbyists/bribers would probably be the only people a blackmailer would focus on, versus a whole branch of the government. If you wanted the latter, that would need to be a bigger scandal. And it probably wouldn't be a minor part of your novel then.

It's a little hard to follow what exactly you need without a story synopsis, but I think for starters, you'll really have to target which area of the government you want to threaten to expose. They all operate somewhat independently, though they interact. Do you mean the President/White House? That would be the most prominent, of course. Congressmen deal with lobbyists independently of the President and White House. Members of Congress do tons of things without the White House knowing, so any scandal involving members of Congress is unlikely to hugely threaten the President, unless he/she was involved, too.

Other branches of the government also can function somewhat separately from the President and Congress, but would still create a huge scandal. For example, if the Pentagon (defense department) were involved in something illegal, that would be a major scandal. Or the Treasury. But it would be highly likely that any of those areas of government could act independently of the President (especially if they were holding secret meetings), without his/her knowledge. That's why it's very hard to think of a scenario that would work for blackmailing the whole government.

The only thing that I could think of that would really work for the entirety would be threatening to harm the American people. And in that case, the President would probably be the target.

Blackmailing the U.S. government could almost be impossible because if I'm not mistaken it could be considered a form of terrorism, and the U.S. government does not negotiate with terrorists.

lalyil said:

I never said it has to be the entire government, I just said it has to be more than one Congressman since then it makes it too easy for the police to pin what the terrorists are really after.

As stated before:
"If I'm more specific, the terrorists want to bring down some food industries, but their real target can't be exposed, and so they give some abstract demand to the government to publish some protocol or some illegal activity, and they target the Congressmen involved in this, more than one, so we can't know in advance (both the reader and the police in the story) that the said food industries are their real target."

I just need to think of such activity that said Congressman/government officials would want to hide from the public (or HAVE to hide because it's illegal.. it doesn't even have to be illegal but rather something the REALLY wouldn't want the public to know and again relating preferably relating to lobbyists/industries..)

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Another problem you have is that our congress passes laws that make their shady dealings legal. Big cash bribes and sex scandals are the only things I see our politicians get nailed for. You also don't have to go through elaborate blackmail schemes to target our food industries. Our food regulation is lax and there are recalls back to back. Just watch the news for specific problem farms with wide distribution, and you have yourself an easy target.

lalyil said:

I never said it has to be the entire government, I just said it has to be more than one Congressman since then it makes it too easy for the police to pin what the terrorists are really after.

As stated before:
"If I'm more specific, the terrorists want to bring down some food industries, but their real target can't be exposed, and so they give some abstract demand to the government to publish some protocol or some illegal activity, and they target the Congressmen involved in this, more than one, so we can't know in advance (both the reader and the police in the story) that the said food industries are their real target."

I just need to think of such activity that said Congressman/government officials would want to hide from the public (or HAVE to hide because it's illegal.. it doesn't even have to be illegal but rather something the REALLY wouldn't want the public to know and again relating preferably relating to lobbyists/industries..)

Click to expand...

OK

This is not very easy to follow but let me try to puzzle it out:

Let's say the terrorists' endgame is to crash the US wheat industry. The US is the 3rd largest wheat producer in the world; I am not entirely sure what the results would be if you were to seriously damage the US wheat crop, but I suspect other big producers like China and India could benefit from the increase in prices that you'd think a drop in supply would cause.

The problem is that it's not terribly easy to see how your efforts at disrupting a big agribusiness could be furthered by blackmailing a politician or a government. You could introduce wheat diseases into the crop - funguses, say - which would probably be the best way of doing this short of inventing weather control and having it hail a lot. I don't quite see why you would need to get a politician involved?

Or let's say the plan is, say, to destroy Haagen-Dazs ice cream (for some reason). You could have a crack at this by finding a way to poison a lot of ice cream in a way that looks negligent on the part of the manufacturer, which would then lead to product recalls, loss of public trust, etc. Again: how does blackmailing a politician help? The miscreants are going to want to remain anonymous in any case, so it doesn't really help in terms of "Bob is blackmailing Joe Biden, so he can't ALSO be behind the ice-cream plot."

Basically I don't think we can solve this problem unless you explain the plot in more detail to us. You don't need to be cagey about it, nobody's going to nick your idea. Which food industry? What terrorists, and why are they after it?

Torgo said:

Or let's say the plan is, say, to destroy Haagen-Dazs ice cream (for some reason). You could have a crack at this by finding a way to poison a lot of ice cream in a way that looks negligent on the part of the manufacturer, which would then lead to product recalls, loss of public trust, etc. Again: how does blackmailing a politician help? The miscreants are going to want to remain anonymous in any case, so it doesn't really help in terms of "Bob is blackmailing Joe Biden, so he can't ALSO be behind the ice-cream plot."

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Nooooooooooooo... Anything but ice cream.

This might be a tangent, but having read extensively on every aspect of the us government and how it affects society, I can assure you that it is exempt from having anything illegal exposed, because it's inherently the source of legality, on almost every scale, even a global scale. By this I mean that -the us government is a dominant force on using legislation or the lack thereof to complete any task in its best interest, and even when the said tasks are "illegal" by some moral definition, there's no long term accountability, because the people in charge come and go so often, and Americas reputation is not at stake whatsoever. Everything that makes America what it is.. is a result of some governmental shortcoming (exposed) followed by uprising citizens who amend the laws, and it never ends. America is infamous for this.