{"id":1226023,"date":"2023-09-25T12:29:26","date_gmt":"2023-09-25T12:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/09\/senator-bob-menendez-indictment-corruption\/"},"modified":"2023-09-25T12:29:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T12:29:26","slug":"senator-bob-menendez-is-corrupt-so-is-the-court-that-will-judge-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/09\/25\/senator-bob-menendez-is-corrupt-so-is-the-court-that-will-judge-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Senator Bob Menendez Is Corrupt. So Is the Court That Will Judge Him."},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Democratic senator Bob Menendez has been indicted for performing favors in exchange for lavish gifts. The Supreme Court justices who will hear his case are guilty of much of the same.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) speaks to the press on Monday following his federal indictment. (Michael M. Santiago \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Gold bars, guns, cash stuffed into a coat, and favors for a foreign government \u2014 the new indictment of US senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat representing New Jersey, reads like the plot of a cheap pulp novel satirizing political graft. But the allegations against the longtime lawmaker are all too real \u2014 and the purported scheme all too predictable \u2014 in a country whose judiciary has been effectively telling politicians that corruption is perfectly legal.<\/p>\n

The cartoonish details of the Menendez indictment<\/a> evoke memories of the Abscam<\/a> and Keating Five<\/a> scandals. Indeed, this affair goes way beyond the donation-for-legislation culture that has been normalized in Washington. Federal prosecutors allege an elaborate plot in which Menendez and his wife accepted \u201chundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menendez\u2019s power and influence as a senator to seek to protect and enrich\u201d a trio of businessmen \u201cand to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

In specific, Menendez and his wife stand accused of accepting \u201ccash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value.\u201d The indictment alleges that, in exchange, Menendez passed nonpublic US government information to Egyptian officials; used his position as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman to facilitate and \u201csign off on\u201d weapons sales to that country; plotted to disrupt a criminal investigation into one of the businessmen; and persuaded the Biden administration to install a new prosecutor whom he believed he could influence on behalf of another businessman.<\/p>\n

Menendez has denied the charges against him, depicting himself as a victim of a \u201csmear campaign<\/a>\u201d by those who \u201csimply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator and serve with honor and distinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the alleged facts in the indictment prove true, the big question is: Why would any politician think he could get away with something so brazen?<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Menendez knows that to secure a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove that it was illegal for him to accept the gifts in exchange for a \u201cperformance of an official act,\u201d as the indictment says. And like every American politician, Menendez almost certainly knows that, while that may seem straightforward, the corruption-plagued Supreme Court has deliberately made it anything but.<\/p>\n

Less than a decade ago, justices reviewed a case that echoed<\/a> today\u2019s Menendez scandal. This one involved former Republican governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell, whom a federal jury found guilty on eleven counts of conspiracy for accepting lavish gifts from a businessman in exchange for gubernatorial favors. However, Supreme Court justices unanimously overturned McDonnell\u2019s conviction in 2016 on the grounds that those favors were permissible.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,\u201d wrote<\/a> Chief Justice John Roberts at the time. \u201cIt is instead with the broader legal implications of the government\u2019s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute. . . . Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an \u2018official act.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The landmark decision tightened the legal definition of public corruption, increasing the difficulty for prosecutors to establish a bribery case against a political official.<\/p>\n

Menendez has already once tried<\/a> to use that precedent to halt a previous corruption indictment in a similarly grotesque case that he successfully fought to a mistrial<\/a>. Recent developments may make it even easier for the New Jersey lawmaker to avoid jail once again.<\/p>\n

In 2020, disgraced New York politicians convinced<\/a> courts to use the McDonnell precedent to overturn parts of their high-profile corruption convictions.<\/p>\n

Two years later, the Supreme Court struck again<\/a>, overturning two other Albany corruption convictions. In one of the latter cases, the court declared that bribery charges cannot apply to government officials who \u2014 during brief hiatuses from their jobs \u2014 accept payments to elicit favors from their public-sector cronies just before they return to government employment.<\/p>\n

Then came all<\/a> the<\/a> news<\/a> of Supreme Court justices and their family<\/a> members<\/a> secretly accepting luxury gifts from billionaires and payments from law firms and conservative groups with business before the court. Taken together, those revelations suggested a self-protection motive in the court\u2019s ongoing crusade to complicate, reduce, and ultimately halt the prosecution of corruption at every level of government.<\/p>\n

In this era of super PACs buying elections, lawmakers legislating for their biggest donors, and judges ruling for their benefactors, the Menendez case could be a moment for the government to finally reestablish some basic, minimum commitment to the \u201claw and order\u201d notions that politicians love to tout. No doubt, that\u2019s what federal prosecutors are trying to do here.<\/p>\n

The problem is that Supreme Court justices have for years been legalizing \u2014 and personally engaging in \u2014 similar kinds of corruption. At the same time, top Democrats<\/a> have constantly assured justices that, no matter how repugnant their behavior, there will be no serious challenge to their power.<\/p>\n

Considering that, the high court may feel emboldened to use the Menendez case not to counter Americans\u2019 perception<\/a> that the government is hopelessly rotted through with corruption but to instead make the rot even worse.<\/p>\n

Averse to criminalizing the same kind of behavior they themselves engage in, justices could use the case to further whittle down the definitions of terms such as \u201cbribery\u201d and \u201cofficial act\u201d to almost nothing.<\/p>\n

In short, they could make corruption not a crime but the legal, court-approved ethos of American governance.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Lever<\/i>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gold bars, guns, cash stuffed into a coat, and favors for a foreign government \u2014 the new indictment of US senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat representing New Jersey, reads like the plot of a cheap pulp novel satirizing political graft. But the allegations against the longtime lawmaker are all too real \u2014 and the purported [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226023"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1226031,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226023\/revisions\/1226031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}