Nice dinners, catered events, golf meetings, game.tickets, 'free' staff to work on projects isn't quite bribery.
A wink and a nudge showing that politicians and senior staff can have a job making millions isn't quite an offer either..no one would.be so gauche. But it sure gets close.
You can also just forgive debt, or anonymously pay it off.
There is no bribery, but I guess the practical difference seems pretty tiny.
They can set up the politicians' children and relatives with lucrative government contracts and positions on the boards of investment funds and foreign oil and gas companies, though. The meme that this is somehow OK needs to die.
The lobbyists are expensive lawyers. Their publically reported fees are the tip of an iceberg, where the bulk of valuable considerations is hidden from view.
Where there's memes there's facts. (smoke -> fire)
The Clintons were "never bribed", for instance, they were just getting paid millions of dollars in "speaking fees".
You don't need to swap briefcases at a park bench to do bribery. There's plenty of unspoken quid pro quo understandings that the participants are well aware of, and this is far more effective as there'll never be any smoking guns to bring them down.
With the Clintons, the big conflict of interest is the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation.
It's a charity (which apparently does pretty good work) but it pays for a lot of things for the Clintons and gives them tremendous status.
Hillary Clinton accepted 100's of millions into her charity from officials with whom she, as a rep. of the US was directly doing business.
She was caught once, directly conferring titles to an individual who contributed to the fund, and the title had to be removed.
Even though I do not generally believe that this is a form of corruption, it's a massive conflict of interest. Just like an exec how owns 90% of a company and takes office has to put said investment in a 'blind trust' - I believe the Clinton Foundation should have effectively been turned into a 'blind trust' as well.
But there are 100% cases of soft pay for access going on here.
Edit: to be more precise, the Clinton charity accepted money from officials of countries and other orgs that the US was dealing with, wherein Hillary was a rep of the US Gov. Not necessarily individuals she was dealing with directly. I'm not throwing flames here, just saying 'conflict of interest'.
