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Apart from the legality, there is an ethical question of whether the FBI carried the Abscam sting to the point of inducing the politicians to take bribes. It was not the usual sting. The agency was not simply participating in ongoing criminal activity. To some degree, it set up the conditions for the crime. The bounteous Arab sheik was strictly the creation of the bureau. The targets of its probe were sometimes subjected to a pretty hard sell—never by the FBI, but by contacts who were anxious to set up deals with the high-spending sheik. When Middleman Joseph Silvestri first approached Congressman James Florio in his office on Capitol Hill, he was turned down. Silvestri then called Florio at home, inviting the Congressman out for a "good time" and adding that his friends were "very, very generous." Florio finally hung up on him. A top Justice Department official makes the point strongly that the FBI did not in the least encourage Silvestri to make this kind of pitch; he did it all on his own initiative. But it did happen.
Though the FBI insists it was scrupulous in its questioning of suspects and made every effort to avoid entrapment, civil libertarians can contend that the operation smacks uncomfortably of Big Brother. FBI Director Wil liam Webster phoned Senator Larry Pressler to congratulate him for emerging clean from his bribery test. But, asks Congress man William Hughes, who also resisted temptation: "Is it proper for the Executive Branch to pose a litmus test for the legislature?"
Representative James Howard, another who passed the test, objects: "If there's reason to believe that a just would take a bribe, that's one thing. But just to go shopping with a lot of money, that's different. I resent a little bit that I was put in this position. In public life, there are enough temptations. Who needs another one?"
Ultimately, not all the Congressmen may be indicted. But their names and faces have been splashed all over television and the press. It is one thing for a Mafioso to get bad publicity; his career hardly depends on public approval. But politicians who face re-election can be ruined by such press coverage. Only one of the members of Congress under investigation is a Republican, but G.O.P. Senate Whip Ted Stevens protests: "Reputations have been seriously damaged in a manner not consistent with the standards of American jurisprudence."
Another unsettling element is the extensive leakage of the facts of the case to the press even before the targets of the probe were told they were under investigation. Says Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz: "This is not a press leak but a press hemorrhage." Former Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox believes that "little leaks are one thing. Systematically giving out information of this scale raises real worries about the sensitivity of the people engaged in the administration of justice." Burke Marshall, a Yale law professor who once served as Assistant U.S. Attorney General, complained in the New York Times, "the deliberate, pervasive spread of selective information" is a "violation of every standard of professional conduct."