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How many politicians from each party have been convicted of corruption in the 2020s?

Checked on November 17, 2025
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Executive summary

Available compiled lists show many individual convictions of U.S. politicians in the 2020s but no single, authoritative tally by party in the provided sources; Wikipedia’s decade lists and related compilations enumerate state, local and federal convictions case-by-case (examples include Delaware Auditor Kathy McGuiness (D) and multiple Republican state officials) rather than summarizing totals by party [1] [2] [3]. Academic literature emphasizes that conviction counts reflect prosecutorial, institutional and political factors as much as individual wrongdoing [4].

1. What the sources actually offer — case lists, not party tallies

The materials in the search results are mostly lists or databases of convicted officials (federal, state and local) rather than analyses that sum convictions by party across the 2020s; for example, Wikipedia maintains a “List of 2020s American state and local politicians convicted of crimes” that names specific convicted Democrats and Republicans but does not present a clean party-by-party count for the decade [1]. GovTrack’s misconduct database similarly catalogs incidents and types of misconduct rather than producing a definitive partisan total [5]. If you want a precise numeric breakdown by party, those raw lists are the source material you would need to aggregate yourself [1] [5].

2. Examples the sources highlight — both parties appear

Reporting and reference lists explicitly name both Democrats and Republicans convicted in the 2020s: the Wikipedia 2020s state/local list cites Democratic officials such as Delaware Auditor Kathy McGuiness (convicted of corruption) and Republican officials including Frank Artiles and others convicted or pleading guilty to various crimes [1]. At the federal level, a separate Wikipedia list of federal officials convicted of corruption offenses catalogs many historical convictions and notes the statutes used, again without decade party tallies [2] [3].

3. Why a simple partisan count is misleading — institutional and political context

Academic research warns that conviction totals are shaped by enforcement choices, institutional capacity, legal definitions and political dynamics: convictions rise or fall depending on prosecutorial priorities, judicial interpretations, and institutional independence—not only on the underlying incidence of corruption [4]. The Cambridge review argues we should treat conviction statistics as reflecting the “politics of criminal accountability,” where micro (individual), meso (institutional) and macro (regime-level) factors determine who is charged and convicted [4].

4. Complications: definitions, levels of government, and types of offenses

Different lists employ different definitions. Some compilations focus only on “corruption” narrowly defined (bribery, graft, public corruption statutes), while others include a broader mix of offenses (fraud, election crimes, campaign finance violations) or exclude state-only convictions in federal lists [2] [6]. The federal corruption list, for instance, documents convictions under specific statutes (Hobbs Act, honest services fraud, §201 bribery) and excludes non-corruption offenses or acquittals, skewing cross-list comparisons unless you harmonize definitions first [2] [6].

5. What the sources do and do not say about pardons and political interference

Some organizations document how clemency decisions alter the practical meaning of convictions: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reports that presidential clemency has removed prison time for several convicted politicians and that changes in DOJ structure can affect future prosecutions; such developments change the landscape without altering original conviction counts [7]. The provided sources do not offer a consolidated party-by-party list of post-conviction clemencies for the 2020s [7].

6. How you could produce a party-by-party tally from these sources

To build a defensible count using the materials here, you would need to (a) choose which lists to include (federal only, state/local, or both), (b) fix a definition of “corruption” (which statutes/offenses qualify), and (c) manually extract party affiliation and conviction year from the cited databases (Wikipedia lists and GovTrack) and sum them. The sources we have point to those raw lists [1] [5] [2], but they stop short of presenting a consolidated partisan total.

7. Bottom line for your question

Available sources document numerous convictions of both Democratic and Republican politicians in the 2020s and provide raw lists you can aggregate; however, none of the provided search results offers a definitive, pre-compiled count of “how many politicians from each party have been convicted of corruption in the 2020s.” To answer numerically, one must extract and reconcile entries from the cited lists and define the scope [1] [5] [2] [3].

Want to dive deeper?
How many federal-level politicians (Congress, Cabinet) from each party were convicted of corruption in the 2020s?
Which states have the highest number of convicted politicians by party during the 2020s?
How do conviction rates for corruption compare between Democrats and Republicans in local vs. state offices in the 2020s?
What major corruption cases involving elected officials shaped public perception of each party in the 2020s?
What sources and databases track political corruption convictions by party and how reliable are they?