EXCLUSIVE: Weapons Giant RTX Pays Fine to Settle Charges of Bribery and Fraud After Spreading Legal Payoffs Across Washington to Ensure Continued Political Protection

Admitting to a multiyear corporate crime spree would end with executives behind bars in a functioning democracy. In the absence of one, RTX helped resolve matters by carpet bombing congress with cash.

The chief target of RTX’s precision-guided airstrikes of political money were members of congress, but during the past two years Harris and Trump were the company’s No. 1 and No. 2 bull's-eyes, in that order. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

RTX, the country’s second largest weapons contractor, agreed to pay over $950 million to settle criminal charges it faced for defrauding the government and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Justice Department announced earlier this week. The offenses were committed by RTX’s subsidiary Raytheon Company, which cheated the Pentagon on deals involving PATRIOT missiles and a radar system, paid bribes to “a high-level Qatari military official to obtain lucrative defense contracts,” and submitted falsified documents when applying for export licenses, stated a Justice Department press release about the settlement issued on Wednesday. 

The scope and scale of the company’s wrongdoing was extremely serious, as reflected in the stern remarks of officials from the Pentagon, FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations who were cited in the press release. “Raytheon Corporation engaged in a systematic and deliberate conspiracy that knowingly and willfully violated US fraud and export laws,” Special Agent in Charge William Walker of the latter agency. “Raytheon’s bribery of government officials, specifically those involved in the procurement of US military technology, posed a national security threat to both the United States and its allies.”

Thought forking over almost $1 billion to the government wasn’t ideal, the penalty was effectively part of the cost of doing business for RTX, and not a particularly high cost in light of its current market cap of about $167 billion and projected 2024 revenues $72.5 billion, which would be an all time record. Furthermore, the government and RTX entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement so none of the corporation’s trio of senior executives – CEO Gregory Hayes, COO Christopher Calio, and CFO Neil Mitchill Jr., who collectively netted more than $41 million – will be losing sleep over the possibility of being forced to spend  a few weekends wearing an orange suit while picking up trash along the highway, let alone a stretch in prison.

To ensure the consequences of their criminality would be no more than a nuisance, RTX implemented a scheme similar to but far simpler than the one that got it into trouble in the first place. The key difference was that the company didn’t have to go to the trouble or run the risks involved in bribing foreign officials or dummying up bogus paperwork to supply the US government, RTX strategically carpet bombed congress with money during the months leading up to the settlement.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s ability to rig political conventions and other highly refined political skills, combined with her devotion to corporate donors helped make her RTX’s logical top choice in congress for a massive financial first strike. Photo: Wasserman Schultz’s official portrait.

On August 14, the company launched a barrage of precision-guided missiles outfitted with cash-stuffed warheads that delivered $147,500 to 67 strategically selected lawmakers. The No. 1 recipient was Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who received $7,500 for her campaign treasury and $5,000 for her Leadership PAC.

Numerous other influential Democrats scored $5,000 from RTX for their campaign or PAC accounts, including Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democratic Caucus, Steny Hoyer, a two-time House majority leader, and Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The company also successfully targeted key Republicans with $5,000 throw weight munitions, among others Jerry Moran of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Susan Collins, who also has a seat on the Intelligence Committee and is the Ranking Member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which sets the Pentagon’s annual budget, and Kevin Cramer of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

RTX launched another saturation bombing campaign on September 19 that deposited a total of $176,000 with pinpoint accuracy into the accounts of 70 lawmakers. The lucky recipients of $5,000 payloads this time included Democratic Congressmen Adam Smith, the weapons industry’s personal Whore of Babylon in Washington, as I recently wrote about here, and James Clyburn, the House Assistant Democratic Leader, and on the Senate side Richard Blumenthal of the Armed Services Committee.

GOP beneficiaries of RTX’s political dispensations included Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, and Rick Scott, his colleague there. Mario Diaz-Balart is one of the most reliably hawkish members of the House whose always willing to lend a hand to major defense contractors such as RTX, and is a top figure in congressional caucuses that support Israel, Egypt, and Taiwan, three core US allies and buyers of American-made weaponry. 

The August and September cash-bombing runs represented a small part of RTX’s overall 2023 to 2024 political contribution campaigns, which has seen the company shell out $2.6 million so far. In addition to hitting a large swathe of congress, the firm larded Kamala Harris and Donald Trump with $244,201 and $127,695, respectively, making them RTX’s No. 1 and No. 2 individual recipients. The company donated $248,000 to Republican national and congressional political committees and $137,000 to their Democratic counterparts.

RTX’s supplemented its political influence efforts with lobbying expenditures of more than $18 million since January of 2023. The money paid for the work of 83 lobbyists last year and 74 up until now this year, with about three-quarters of those former members of congress, Hill staffers, or officials with the Pentagon or other government agencies. 

With the type of first-rate help money like that can buy, it’s no surprise that other than for a tiny amount of negative press, the announcement of RTX’s deal with the Justice Department hardly caused a political or financial blip. When the stock market opened on Wednesday, the day the settlement was made public, RTX’s share price stood at around $125 and as trading is coming to a close today it had crept up by about a dollar, adding modestly to a jump of almost 70 percent during the past year.

So even though the country’s political system has now reached such a decrepit state that in a few weeks the only two candidates who have a chance of winning the presidency are both deeply unpopular and comically awful, American democracy indisputably remains without a peer as the best that money can buy, as witnessed once again in RTX’s ease in escaping any real legal or political accountability over its recent rampage of corporate crime.