Yesterday, a jury in Manhattan discovered New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez responsible of 16 counts together with bribery, obstruction, trustworthy providers fraud, and wire fraud. He has not but resigned, and exhibits no signal of desiring to.
Menendez was initially indicted in September of 2023, alongside together with his spouse Nadine Arslanian Menendez and three New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Jose Uribe. Prosecutors alleged a comical marketing campaign of corruption, with the senator utilizing his place as chair of the Senate Overseas Relations Committee to behave as a political concierge for presidency brokers from Egypt and Qatar. The scheme included a no-work consulting gig for Nadine at a halal meat firm, tons of of hundreds of {dollars} in contributions to Menendez’s marketing campaign, an elliptical machine, and a brand new Mercedes to exchange the one which bought totaled in 2018 when Nadine hit and killed a pedestrian in Bogota, New Jersey. (The city will get its title from Karma, who has clearly deserted us to our destiny and wandered off to make horrible jokes.)
Once they raided the couple’s dwelling in June of 2022, the FBI found nearly half one million in money, a few of IT stuffed within the pockets of a jacket with Menendez’s title and the seal of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Brokers additionally found upwards of $100,000 gold bars, conveniently marked with the serial numbers of bars which reported stolen by Daibes in 2013 and later recovered by police. Daibes fingerprints had been additionally on a number of the envelopes of money discovered within the Menendez’s home.
This was not the primary rodeo for the senator, who escaped conviction on a previous corruption indictment in 2017 due to a hung jury. And so he gamely challenged the warrant and accused the prosecutors of misconduct born out of a “zeal to ‘get again’” at him. He painted his critics as racist, huffing that “IT just isn’t misplaced on me how shortly some are dashing to guage a Latino and push him out of his seat,” and claiming that, as a toddler of Cuban refugees, maintaining giant quantities of money round the home was a part of his heritage. He additionally blamed his spouse, from whom he severed his case, alleging that he had no thought how all that money and gold made its means into the home they shared collectively.
This place was considerably undercut at trial by Nadine’s unlucky behavior of documenting each transaction with an in depth textual content. “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we’re the proud homeowners of a 2019 Mercedes.❤️” she tapped out in April of 2019 after Uribe fronted her with the $15,000 downpayment for the automobile.
Later corporations related to the co-defendants made funds on the car.
Menendez escaped a reckoning final time in mild of the Supreme Courtroom’s determination to throw out the bribery case towards former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. However the politician appears to have taken SCOTUS’s ruling, which made IT nearly not possible to show political bribery, as a problem.
“Inform Will I’m going to log out this sale to Egypt immediately,” he wrote to his spouse in 2018, referring to a sale of tank munitions which had been on maintain due to that nation’s human rights document.
“Anytime you want something you might have my quantity and we are going to make every part occur,” Nadine texted an Egyptian official in 2020.
Whether or not it will fulfill the Supreme Courtroom’s pro-corruption wing is unclear. After the McDonnell opinion and the Trump immunity determination, IT’s not clear whether or not something wanting a notarized declaration by all events buying and selling money for official acts will suffice. However the Senator positive did give IT the outdated school attempt!
Within the meantime, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Senate Majority Chief Charles Schumer are calling for Menendez to resign or be expelled. In all probability as a result of they’re RACIST!
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore the place she produces the Legislation and Chaos substack and podcast.
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