Knee jerk would be "sell out the nation for a couple of grand?" , but in actuality, he could be getting a lot more under the table, or there is more to the bill than that, which is really what he canned it for.
The problem is they perform their nefarious deeds in a highly scripted manner to create plausible deniability, there will never be the clean evidentiary trail direct to the political types, like people seem to expect. But at some point the preponderance of the evidence must get to the people. Just like they have normalized election fraud they too have normalized the graft. Not accusing but still aware that a wife that is involved in international shipping involving the Chinese, is there any doubt that McConnell could be compromised?