I’m going to take a stab at why the BLM would pay $700K for 10 acres that’s worth aound $10 - 20K. What if Harry Reid or his cronies owned that land through a shell corporation? If they sold the property to the BLM In essence he would have gotten his own employer (US GOVT) to pay him a profit of approx $680K that he and his partners would split and get to pocket. That’s corruption to the core. Multiply that by hundreds of transactions (which is often the case on asset fraud cases I work on) and you might be able to guess where a lot of the tax dollars are disappearing to and why he’s a multimillionaire. Reid would probably use multiple accomplices (namely attorneys) to do the job but I bet real estate holding companies set up in shell company names would be the method of choice to handle the transactions. I’ll place bets you will also find that he ended up with property that was reparceled into smaller tracts that were conveyed to him for nothing too if you look harder. I see reparceling used like that in government corruption cases from time to time, especially when the elcted officials are buddies with the chief tax assessors or recorders. In one case in Florida I found that the tax assessor had hidden the elected official ownerhip interests in a large number of propertties by using the “confidentially” feature (usually used by law enforcement) while I have seen situations where they were able to conceal the records from the deputy clerks as well.
Politicians have been doing this for years. Ann Richards was a partner in a company that bought a bunch of land south of Austin. Just so happened a few years later Mopac Expressway went through.
I’ve been told that Lake Sam Rayburn was named after him for a reason.
The only difference between now and then is now they don’t even try to hide it.