"Follow the money" is a catchphrase popularized by the 1976 drama-documentary motion picture All The President's Men, which suggests a money trail or corruption scheme within high (often political) office.
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Origin
For the film, screenwriter William Goldman attributed the phrase to Deep Throat, the informant who took part in revealing the Watergate Scandal. However, the phrase is neither mentioned in the non-fiction book that preceded the film, nor any documentation of the scandal. The book does contain the phrase "The key was the secret campaign cash, and it should all be traced," which Woodward says to Senator Sam Ervin. This may have been condensed to the phrase "follow the money" in the screenwriting process.
History
The phrase Follow the money was mentioned by Henry E. Peterson at the 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as Earl J. Silbert was nominated to U.S. Attorney. A 1975 book by Clive Borrell and Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today, also uses the phrase.
Since the 1970s, "follow the money" has been used several times in investigative journalism and political debate. One example is Follow the Money, a series of CBS reports.
In September 2016, the Trump campaign used the phrase to criticize Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. In February 2017, Carl Bernstein used the phrase to encourage reporters to discover President Trump's potential conflicts of interest.
Popular culture
In an episode of The Wire, Detective Lester Freamon uses the phrase when investigating the dealings of a Baltimore criminal gang to explain the political difficulty of investigating organized crime, saying "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you".