Earlier this month, President Donald Trump offered $5,000 checks to every adult in America if Republicans win the midterms. Last week the president’s oldest son acknowledged that his wedding reception in the Bahamas was paid for, in part, by a Russian oligarch.
While Vice President JD Vance was dismissing the idea that the president was offering a bribe, and just before Donald Trump Jr. reportedly paid back that oligarch, a mostly anonymous social media account announced it had calculated a way to measure corruption in the Trump administration.
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“[I]t is safe to say that the current administration is the most corrupt in American history by a margin no predecessor approached, on any reading of the evidence,” it wrote on Substack.
With that, the single-named person operating The Leah Files appeared to provide the kind of empirical data the president’s critics always assumed existed, and that journalists and researchers have spent years piecing together, one installment at a time.
That message was reshared more than 300 times on Substack, viewed more than 160,000 times on TikTok, and more than 4 million times on X, where at least one member of Congress and a co-founder of the investigative outlet Drop Site News shared it. The White House did not immediately respond to an email sent Tuesday afternoon seeking comment for this story.
Since debuting on X and YouTube in March, the account has amassed more than 500,000 followers across social media. On Substack The Leah Files has one of the fastest rates of new paid subscribers in the U.S. politics category, according to the platform. At one point it was listed as high as No. 21, just behind Crooked Media (No. 20). As of Wednesday afternoon it was No. 34, one spot ahead of Crooked Media and one spot behind The Lincoln Project.
With that popularity has come scrutiny. She says in her podcast description that she has both “spent 20 years in intelligence learning how to find what people hide,” and can “read the behavioral tells,” when a subject’s “words and their actions don’t match.”
Her effort to bring quantitative data, at times, fuels uncorroborated rumors. On TikTok, she speculated that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “was brought in to tank the U.S. dollar for the Uniparty,” and entertained the question of whether the government is “complicit” in child trafficking. She also dug into the theory that “certain nefarious characters within the FBI and Department of War helped assassinate Charlie Kirk and cover it up.” After promising to provide “receipts,” she told viewers, “I also spent my career in intelligence, and I damn-well know what we’re capable of doing.”
“I’ll see something like the exploding mic theory, and I’ll go look at the government contracts,” Leah said in an interview, referring to one rumor about Kirk’s death. “I just pose the questions of correlation,” she said. “Correlation doesn’t mean causality, but it is something to think about.”
The findings she published last week about the level of corruption in the current administration were, she wrote on Substack, the result of an “honest and unbiased” comparison. Those who agreed with the conclusion appeared not to spend much time analyzing the methodology. Those who disagreed did not either, with some assuming it stemmed from partisanship.
“I’m a Republican,” Renn Leah Pfeiffer, the person behind the account, told Straight Arrow in a pair of interviews last week. “I‘ve always been a Republican.” She also said she voted for Trump twice: once in 2016 and again in 2024, after not voting in 2020.
Calculating corruption
To measure corruption, Leah (as she prefers to be called) sought a widely accepted definition of the term. She found one adopted nearly two decades ago by the United Nations. It included bribery, embezzlement, influence-peddling and methods to conceal those illegal activities. Leah modified the definition for her calculation, largely ignoring scandals without monetary impact, and without regard to the behavior’s legality. Corruption, by her definition, is “the conversion of public power into private benefit,” regardless of the means or legality, because “every kleptocracy in the calibration set made its theft lawful first.”
To make it more objective, she gave greater emphasis to allegations proven in court and less to those merely reported publicly, which she acknowledged carried an element of subjectivity: enriching a president or family “through the office carries a weight of 20 points,” she wrote. “Bribery and pay-to-play carry 15 points,” and nepotism, “pressure on the press and election manipulation carry 10 points each.” “What relatives took from the office” is 25 points, whereas “foreign money into family vehicles” was 15.
Change those weights, she wrote on Substack, and “Reagan rises, Nixon rises, and the current administration is still first by double digits.” She also acknowledged that her calculation “does not score violence,” which is a separate lens through which world leaders can be scrutinized.
She said she calculated the level of corruption for every modern American president, and for “the men that history remembers for looting their countries”: Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Suharto of Indonesia and even William “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall associates that famously looted New York in the 1800s.
Trump beat them all and is projected to go even higher on the scale, Leah wrote, citing the trajectory of other corrupt leaders later in their tenure. When asked if the actions of the second Trump administration are what she envisioned when she voted for him in 2024, Leah told Straight Arrow, “Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Nothing is. Nothing that he’s done.”
Leah’s corruption calculation deviated from her usual follow-the-money content and veered closer to the work of groups like Transparency International, a large multinational anti-corruption organization, that says it “pioneered tools and methodologies to measure corruption.”
“We’ve never seen anything like that on this scale,” the group’s co-founder Frank Vogl told Straight Arrow when asked about corruption in the second Trump administration. “How do you measure that in dollars? You probably can’t.”
Vogl said Trump’s behavior since returning to office is more open, brazen and perhaps faster than he has ever seen. Leah did not provide her underlying data, but Vogl said he partially agreed with her finding.
“I don’t think anybody has any doubt that the level of corruption that is now taking place is greater than that in any other US administration,” he said. But on the world stage, “Whatever Trump has taken so far is extremely small.” Nigerian’s former dictator Sani Abacha is alleged to have amassed a $6 billion fortune during his reign, he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fortune is estimated at around $800 billion, he said. Leah’s calculation puts Trump above both of those men.
Referring to the speed and scale of corruption currently, Vogl added, “It’s amazing.”
Online sleuthing
In the era of big data, million-dollar campaigns, billion-dollar donors, and, more recently, a trillion-dollar disruptor, the door has never been wider for self-styled sleuths promising to follow the money, find “hidden forces shaping politics,” and calculate corruption.
Some who claim to be unearthing corruption have, in fact, been accused of just that type of behavior. The founder of Project Veritas, whose undercover videos claim to be “exposing corruption” in government, media and liberal organizations, was ousted from the nonprofit in 2023 after an internal audit documented how he spent its funds on private travel, opulent lodging and, reportedly, DJ equipment.
Around the time MAGA influencer Data Republican was publishing what she claimed was evidence linking left-wing activists to a host of nongovernment agencies, the person behind the account was revealed to have been a special government employee at the Department of Defense.
Leah recently had her full name published online by critics, along with details of her personal life: family connections to the intelligence community, her presence in the world of competitive poker, and her brief time a decade ago as a small business owner.
One independent investigative reporter whose work has been published in Politico and other outlets told Straight Arrow that the need to disclose potential conflicts and qualifications necessitates revealing your identity as an investigator. But this person added, it “doesn’t mean her info can’t have merit.”
How a two-time Trump voter converted
The research into measuring Trump’s level of corruption among world leaders took six weeks, she said. The process of turning against the president she voted for twice took longer. And it began with Democrats.
Leah said she works as a certified fraud examiner and is paid to “find fraud and money laundering.” That work led to jobs as a contractor in the intelligence community, and now, the private sector. Last year, when she heard Democrats on C-SPAN say they were shutting down the government to protect affordable healthcare, she got curious. She looked into the numbers and, she said, saw “they were all funded by the hospitals and, and lobbyists who make the prices so high.”
So, for a while she was investigating Democrats. “After the shutdown,” she said, “is when this administration started to show their true colors. And that’s when I started looking into it.” She cited the revelation this January that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick planned a visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island years earlier, despite previous denials.
“Then Pam Bondi did something stupid,” Leah said, referring to the former attorney general who, in February, told Fox News she had Epstein’s “client list” on her desk. Bondi later acknowledged no list exists. By the time Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March, she and other Trump officials were on Leah’s radar. That month she launched The Leah Files on X and YouTube.
“They just kept kind of offering themselves up,” Leah said of Trump administration officials who became the focus of her burgeoning side hustle. “I would never want to do social media full time,” Leah said in an interview.
“That’s just how it kind of all came together,” she said. “I just haven’t had a chance to get back to the Democrats.” Leah said she is still a registered Republican but considers herself “politically homeless.”
