Hahaha! Yeah, probably.
Wrongdoers proposing harsh penalties for their own wrongdoings is nothing new. Heck, look at the book of Esther.
Thank you. So he may be better off in prison in the end. At least he’ll not be homeless and hungry.
I suppose he could argue that collecting gold bars and his other activities were outside his “official duties as a Member of Congress.” I also expect that argument would go over like feces in a punchbowl.
He needs to sing “Rock Me Gently” though. But yeah, good news.
Alicia Menendez opened her show tonight by saying she would not be covering the story but MSNBC would continue covering it and they would not go easy on him on her behalf:
Ugh, I’d have so many questions about my family and life when this news came out.
When this story first came out, I tilted my head back and yelled at the sky: “Menendez!!!” Then I remembered the evil Simpsons character was Mendoza.
A rundown by LegalEagle of the charges currently facing Menendez. It looks pretty sloppy and brazen on his side, but the prosecutors may still have a tough time.
Maybe a psych eval. is warranted for this guy. He had to have known they could come knocking at any time, and he had the money in envelopes in his clothes pockets. This is a cartoonishly stupid way to store it. You can’t even say he was hiding it.
A surprising side effect of the Roberts supreme court…
I’d have to assume there would not be all that many questions. She may not have known specifically what Dad was up to, but she probably knew an awful lot about his character and as both an adult and a journalist had to also know the kinds of things people of that character commonly get up to.
How far her own apple has landed from that tree will be interesting question for her to ponder.
Menendez’s wife Nadine was involved in a fatal crash in 2018. At the time, it seemed to have been resolved, but new questions, such as why a high-ranking cop just happened to show up and advise her at the scene of the crash, have arisen in the wake of the corruption charges. The whole thing does smell a little hinky, IMHO.
That sounds to me like the right way to handle it: Recognize the conflict of interest, and recuse oneself from it, while still letting other qualified people deal with it.
It’s a lesson a lot of other folks could stand to learn.
Superseding indictment just dropped, this one alleging that Menendez was a foreign agent for Egypt:
Holy shit.
I understand the idea behind not expelling someone prior to conviction. But I also think maybe just maybe we shouldn’t have an outed spy in the halls of our government.
At the next GOP Senate caucus meeting:
Senator Turtle: “Next item on the agenda is beefing up the foreign agent law. We can’t have senators acting as agents for foreign countries for pay. I think this is a no-brainer, both on principle and because we can really hammer the Dems with it. Agreed?”
Senator Turtle looks around the room. No-one makes eye contact. Several senators look down at their feet, fidget with pens…
It’s like you’re in the room!
Hopefully, the spying charges will be enough to convince this guy to step down. What Santos did was terrible, but at least he wasn’t a foreign agent while heading the Foreign Relations Committee.
Do you think the whole committee might have to be investigated