It was a year earlier, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, that Abscam hit the front pages:

"The modus operandi, now widely known, called for an FBI agent, posing as a sheik, or as a sheik's representative, to offer money, typically forty or fifty thousand dollars, to a congressman if he would undertake to sponsor legislation to permit a designated Arab into the country." Half a dozen lawmakers had succumbed and had been convicted, though sometimes of a lesser charge than "accepting a bribe." Mr. Tigar is of course parti pris, but he is persuasive in explicating the distinction between forms of police action that discover already committed crimes (e.g., asking to purchase previously distilled moonshine whiskey during Prohibition) and ones that provoke a crime. MT: "I would have said that the fictitious character of the government's scripting was enough to carry this beyond the outer limits of permissible law-enforcement conduct."