Countries should be willing to overlook “mild amounts of corruption” in government if it serves the larger goal of political stability, according to a U.S. lawyer and political activist closely aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
“This may be the most provocative thing I say,” explained Will Chamberlain during a speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Jerusalem, an event that brought together far-right figures from Europe and Israel along with MAGA leaders closely linked to the Trump administration.
Chamberlain is vice president for external affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes NatCon, a conference that in previous years has been hosted in cities across the U.S. and Europe.
He is also senior counsel with the Article III Project, a MAGA group set up to fight against “lawfare,” which it describes as efforts by “Marxist” Democrats to weaponize the justice system against Trump and his political allies. The group has recently targeted what it calls “climate lawfare,” which refers to lawsuits that aim to hold oil and gas companies accountable for misleading the public about climate change
“Corruption is bad,” Chamberlain said during his Oct. 8 speech at NatCon. “But I think in general, countries should be willing to tolerate mild amounts of corruption in order to avoid lawfare.”
Chamberlain, through the Article III Project, works with the conservative political strategist and lawyer Mike Davis, who claims credit for helping win the nomination fights of conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Chamberlain’s comments come as the U.S. approaches midterm elections on Nov. 3 where voters have identified government corruption as a defining issue.
He argued that efforts to impeach and prosecute politicians for corruption have driven up the stakes of elections to the point where candidates either win or risk going to jail, citing the example of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president serving a jail sentence for planning a coup following his 2022 election loss.
He also cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges including fraud and accepting bribes. Earlier this year, Trump said Netanyahu should be pardoned. Chamberlain defended that position, arguing that pardons are a useful tool for reducing political tensions.
“People shouldn’t be afraid of them,” he said. “I think too many people are so obsessed with the idea that no one can ever be above the law that they’ll let their country tear itself apart.”
He added, “There’s another old maxim, ‘let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ I think that’s a bad impulse.”
Chamberlain didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.
‘Climate Lawfare’
This year’s National Conservatism Conference in Israel featured speeches from senior White House official Sebastian Gorka, as well as Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Trump policy blueprint Project 2025.
It took place as Chamberlain’s legal group, the Article III Project, turned its attention to the dozens of lawsuits filed by cities, counties and states across the U.S. against Big Oil.
In early October it co-hosted a Washington, D.C., event where conservative legal experts argued that efforts to hold oil and gas companies legally liable for misleading the public about climate change is a form of “climate lawfare,” which one participant defined as “trying to basically drag these fossil fuel companies into court to get access to their documents and, of course, their pockets.”
The occasion for the event was the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear oral arguments from the oil companies Suncor and Exxon, which are trying to get the court to invalidate a lawsuit against them currently proceeding in Colorado state court.
That Colorado lawsuit alleges, based on extensive historical documentation, that these and other oil companies engaged in multi-decade campaigns to stave off climate regulation by running disinformation campaigns around their key role in global temperature rise.
Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has framed this history of climate denial as large-scale deception meriting federal investigations and lawsuits. In 2024, Whitehouse described the Trump administration’s reported offering of political favors to the oil industry in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions as “the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term.”
From the perspective of MAGA legal activists such as Chamberlain, “lawfare is worse than corruption.”
“I mean, corruption’s bad. I kind of imagine it is like a slow-growing cancer that can undermine ultimately and eventually really hurt your country,” he said.
“But lawfare — and reciprocal, brutal lawfare against heads of state, especially — is kind of like having a gushing, gaping bullet wound in your chest,” he added.
‘Openly Corrupt’
That position appears out of step with many U.S. voters. A recent Fox News poll suggested that 88 percent of voters are “extremely/very concerned” about “corruption in government,” making it the top issue ahead of cost of living, healthcare, and the Iran war.
That poll came out following reporting in the Wall Street Journal that Kimberly Guilfoyle, then U.S. ambassador to Greece, had asked a Trump donor for $100,000 to pay off her credit card bill in exchange for favorable access to the administration.
That seemed to cross a line even for Chamberlain and his colleagues.
After Guilfoyle resigned on Oct. 13, Chamberlain questioned on X whether her resignation message was written by AI, while another senior counsel at the Article III Project described her as “an absolutely stupid pick for U.S. Ambassador to Greece in the first place.”
Yet, Chamberlain argued at NatCon that civil and criminal efforts in recent years to hold Trump legally accountable for alleged financial fraud, defamation, his role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, and other legal violations have been “an enormous strain on the president’s time and resources, as well as everybody else.”
Chamberlain claimed that without unique features of the U.S. legal system, including the lack of an attorney general independent from the White House, “I think Trump would be in jail,” adding that “the Western world would be worse for it.”
Meanwhile Trump has reaped $2.2 billion in 2025 revenues alone from his cryptocurrency holdings and other personal business interests. This has led former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission Larry Noble to describe Trump’s second term as potentially “the most openly corrupt administration in our history.”
