As bad as what happened to the kids is, I'm more interested in knowing more about the blackmail networks and who's using these networks to pull strings.

This seems clearly to be a matter of powerful people being enticed into doing extremely compromising things that just so conveniently got documented and kept secret. If that isn't a clear sign that the government is compromised by foreign or at least malignant powers I don't know what it'd take.

It's the standard blackmail system crooked cops use on each other to keep each other from turning on the rest of them.