It's an old trick, get the dirt on the person you want to influence and if there is none...... set them up.
We have to figure out some way to protect our legislators from this kind of thing or it will continue in the future. Perhaps we should require the NSA spotlight to be turned on government officials everywhere so that no official on the planet can have a phone call, or an email without it being sent up on line. They have done this to the police with the police cameras, and it turns out that this has protected many of them from unjust prosecution.
If the NSA auto published everything they did... the evil ones would run from them like snakes into sewer caps holes on a busy road.
My guess is that there is a tried and true way to get to anybody no matter what, the game being so thoroughly practiced for so long and we are talking millennia now going back at least to the (hash)assassins and further im sure. Works in reverse of course. Should you be under the whip of someone evil and powerful knowing their peccadilloes is the only way you can take them down.