Man, how is this sleazebag criminal still hanging on in high-level national politics, with all the shady crap he is alleged to have pulled that will have him stuck in a courtroom for months during the height of the election season?
Ha ha, psych, we’re talking about Bob Menendez, the senator almost single-handedly responsible for perpetuating certain stereotypes about New Jersey politicians. Cory Booker would have to bury multiple bodies in the Pine Barrens to even come close to raising his criminal game to Menendez’s level.
The latest twist in the saga of Bobby Sticky Fingers has to do with the better than $480,000 worth of cash that federal agents found stashed around his house when they were investigating him last year. Menendez has claimed that keeping that much cash around the house was simply a cultural artifact of his Cuban heritage, that his parents taught him to keep money at home instead of in a bank because you never knew when there was going to be a coup in Cuba and the new government might seize your bank account.
Late Friday, prosecutors filed some new papers with the court suggesting, unsurprisingly, that this explanation was a load of crap:
Some of the cash was wrapped in bands showing it had been withdrawn, at least $10,000 at a time, from a bank where Mr. Menendez and his wife “had no known depository account.” This, prosecutors said, indicated “that the money had been provided to them by another person.”
Come on, there could be so many non-shady reasons for this! Maybe Menendez found the money bands from other banks to be more handsome than the bands that his own bank was wrapping his packages of $10,000 in. Maybe his wife was out shopping and passed a bank and decided on the spur of the moment to pop in and see if she could get some better-looking bands. Maybe the Band Fairy left these bands under Menendez’s pillow.
Of course even if this silly claim was a hundred percent true, Menendez would still have to explain why he was also keeping bars of solid gold stashed around his house and in a safe deposit box, which he would presumably not be able to retrieve if El jefe Trump pulled off a successful coup and named himself dictator like a common Fulgencio Batista.
He would also have to explain all the text exchanges indicating that a couple of Menendez’s scuzzy associates bribed him by buying his wife a $60,000 Mercedes while they bought him multiple fancy watches worth five figures. To the left of the decimal point.
The joint trial of Menendez and two of his business associates gets underway on May 6, which means that with Trump’s ongoing hush money trial, the United States will get the spectacle of a former president and a sitting senator in the dock at the same time in two separate cases involving corruption and bribery. Who says America isn’t great?
The other recent development in the Menendez case is that the senator’s wife Nadine, who was supposed to be a co-defendant with her husband in the upcoming trial, will now be tried separately, possibly in July, after she has surgery for a “newly discovered medical condition.”
If there is a silver lining, it’s that Menendez is still trailing badly in the primaries for his upcoming re-election. Which means, hopefully, after better than a decade of continually being caught and tried by federal prosecutors for all sorts of shady stuff, we’ll finally at least get to see the guy run out of the Senate, presumably leaving a trail of slime behind.
Senator Menendez is not the only concern around here that runs on generous donations.