Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, speaks during a hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2022. (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
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Old School Bribery
There’s something almost nostalgic about reading the indictment against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. By which I mean clownishly nostalgic, because it’s a throwback to an age when our corrupt politicians were old-school crooks, and frankly, rather stupid. There are no seven-levels of separation influence-peddling, no elaborate shell-companies or conspiracies.
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a throwback — a house full of gold bars, envelopes stuffed with cash ($480,000), and a shiny new Mercedes parked in the garage. A slightly modern twist: DNA linking all of this boodle to the guys who paid cash for their own U.S. senator.
The details are dazzling and worth dwelling on for the glaring grift of Menendez and his high-maintenance spouse. The indictment describes how the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using MENENDEZ's power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich [his crooked friends]… and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt. Those bribes included cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value.”
The Egyptian angle makes this a serious case with national security implications, but the whole thing still retains an aura of almost comic opera absurdity. Even though Menendez has been under legal scrutiny for years, he left the baksheesh just lying around his house and stuffed in his clothes. From the indictment:
In or about June 2022, federal agents executed search warrants on the New Jersey home and the safe deposit box of ROBERT MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ, a/k/a Nadine Arslanian, the defendants. In conducting these court-authorized searches, agents found certain of the fruits of MENENDEZ's and NADINE MENENDEZ's corrupt bribery agreement with [his crooked friends] including cash, gold, the luxury vehicle, and home furnishings.
Over $480,000 in cash much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe —was discovered in the home, along with over $ 70,000 in NADINE MENENDEZ's safe deposit box. Some often envelopes contained the fingerprints and/or DNA of [crooked friend] or his driver. Other of the envelopes were found inside jackets bearing MENENDEZ's name and hanging in his closet, as depicted below.
FFS, really.
The headlines today describe Menendez as “defiant,” but what they really mean is “shameless” because he is testing the limits of our new post-shame political culture. Perhaps he thinks that the rules about ethics, evidence, and accountability have been transformed in the Era of Trump, and that he can go along for the ride, even though he is a Democrat.
He’s survived other brushes with the law, including, rather famously, getting a hung jury in his last corruption case. That escape seems to have merely emboldened him, because it surely did not make him more prudent or cautious.
[Weird footnote here: “In 2018, Trump was pranked called by comedian John Melendez, (who is also known as Stuttering John) according to CNN. Trump took the call on Air Force One and congratulated who he thought was Senator Bob Menendez for beating his federal corruption charges.”
TRUMP: How are you? Congratulations on everything, we're proud of you. Congratulations, great job. You went through a tough, tough situation and I don't think a very fair situation, but congratulations.]
**
Fast-forward: Trump himself now faces more than 90 felony charges and Democrats have to decide what to do with one of their own senior senators who is rather obviously a pol besotted with greed.
The contrast between the GOP and Democratic reactions is worth watching closely. So far, a number of prominent Democrats (especially in New Jersey) have denounced Menendez and called for his resignation. Others will surely follow, and there is a noticeable absence of air cover from progressive pundits or media.
But it’s a bit premature to sing hosannas about the Democratic response.
As Politico reports this morning, so far only four Democratic senators — John Fetterman (D-Penn.), Peter Welch (D-Vermont), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) — have called for Menendez’s resignation. Biden is punting. Schumer is holding off. In the cloakrooms and cable tv, there is a lot of foot shuffling and evasion and waiting-for-everyone-else-to-go-first.
The senate is a very clubby place, so the reticence is somewhat understandable. Menendez is also a notorious grudge-holder and his colleagues are reluctant to cross him. And, of course, he’s legally innocent until proven guilty.
But still.
Politico’s playbook reports:
We have heard from a lot of folks in the Dem strategist class, who have no senatorial loyalty to Menendez, that their party is already blowing this by hesitating to cut off a massive political liability that will be used to muddy the waters against Biden and Democratic candidates in House and Senate races next year when the party wants to runs hard against Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.
Exit take: Stay tuned and keep score.
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As she rolls out her new book, it’s worth revisiting the contrast between the 20-something White House aide and the uber-male Praetorian Guard for the endomorphic God King.
When she decided to break with Donald Trump and testify before the January 6 Committee, she knew there would be consequences. Via the NYT:
Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, dropped out of sight last year after she testified in damning detail in a nationally televised committee hearing about President Donald J. Trump’s actions during and after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Facing blistering social media attacks from Mr. Trump and threats from his supporters, she retreated from Washington and cut off contacts with her former White House world….
“I would like not to be a hermit,” she said. But, she added, “I am not a victim in any of this. I did what I did and I knew what I was getting myself into.”
This afternoon a 26-year-old former assistant showed more courage and integrity than an entire administration full of grown-ass adults who were purportedly working in service to the American people, but had long ago decided to serve only their ambition and grievance.
Cassidy Hutchinson did so at risk to her safety. Her social circle. Her career.
And she overcame all of the self-serving rationalizations that prevented the powerful, whose manhoods she held in her palm, from stepping to the plate.
When Trump first crashed into American politics in 2015, it required only political courage to oppose him. Yet one after another, the leading figures of the GOP, from Chris Christie to Jeff Sessions to Ted Cruz, snapped like dry twigs under his boots. And after the elected leaders, the intellectual leaders of the conservative movement fell into line behind the sociopath as well, explaining that they had no choice because, well, Antifa burned buildings and AOC wanted to socialize the economy.
By 2020, it required more than political courage to stand up to Trump—it required physical courage. Adam Kinzinger has received death threats not just against himself, but against his wife and 5 month-old baby. Tim Rice, who voted in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, received so many death threats that his chief of staff took to sending some directly to the police and reserving others for the congressman’s perusal. (Rice recently lost his primary to a Trump loyalist). So many election workers have been threatened by Trump goons (850 according to Reuters) that three states are considering legislation to protect them.
This is the world that every Republican and conservative brought us by failing to show the minimal amount of integrity. Now they are shamed by the shining example of a 26 year-old woman with her life ahead of her, with no motive but love of country, and no power except that which comes from a clear conscience.
I approached America’s Cultural Revolution with mixed expectations. I think many of Rufo’s liberal and progressive detractors have a tendency to downplay the problems posed by left-wing ideologies and by the social justice revolution of the last decade. I think Rufo has done some good reportage on DEI programs run amok. I also think Rufo is an unprincipled political hack so untrustworthy and prone to bending facts when it suits him that it takes away much of the value of that reportage.
America’s Cultural Revolution, like the rest of Rufo’s work, contains some valuable information.
But it has a badly flawed premise and a tendency to skew facts—and, unsurprisingly, arrives at a bad conclusion that is the book’sraison d’être: the justification of the heavy-handed use of state power to crush what Rufo sees as the crushing power of the left.
[GOP Assembly Speake Robin Vos] threatened to impeach Protasiewicz unless she recuses herself from hearing these cases because, while running for the court, she referred to the maps, correctly, as “rigged.”
The blowback to Vos’s impeachment threat has been astonishing. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that it shows “breathtaking contempt” for the will of the voters and cements the reputation of the state’s Republican party as “the most openly authoritarian in the country.” The Wisconsin Democratic Party has been running ads portraying impeachment as an effort to undo the results of an election that Protasiewicz won by 11 points. And news outlets have reported that the conservative justices, who have themselves regularly participated in cases despite much more glaring conflicts, have expressly rejected any rule that would require Protasiewicz to recuse herself.
Scads of letters to the editor have appeared in local papers opposing the move. The moderate Wisconsin State Journal, in an editorial, said Vos’s “intimidating talk of taking her down is wildly irresponsible, undemocratic, and comes off as desperate.”
Vos, in a spirit reminiscent of Senator Tommy Tuberville or Representative Matt Gaetz, remains obstinate. Rather than give up on the idea of impeachment, which even some of his fellow Republicans have expressed qualms about, Vos has tasked a panel of three former state Supreme Court justices to study its possibility in secret, promptly drawing a complaint alleging a violation of the state’s open meetings law. The only panelist whose identity is known is David Prosser, who served on the court from 1998 to 2016.
Prosser, who before his 18 years on the bench served 18 years as a Republican lawmaker, including a stint as Assembly speaker, contributed money to the campaign of Protasiewicz’s conservative rival. As a member of the court, he not only refused to recuse himself from a case involving a law that he helped pass, but ended up writing the majority opinion upholding it. Meanwhile, current members of the court, including Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, have refused to recuse themselves from hearing cases involving major donors to their campaigns.
Talking ain’t doing. That’s why Hutchinson, the Ukrainians and Liz Cheney make the Maga elites (misnomer) so uncomfortable, because looking into the face of real courage shatters the lie they get from watching Vin Diesel and Stallone. The difference is one is real world and the other fantasy. Maga elites (there it is again) can’t embody true courage, so there only hope is to try to reduce the best among us so they can seem a little braver in comparison.
I just had an epiphany--the Rs are cozying up to Menendez and supporting him so that he will switch parties!
Talking ain’t doing. That’s why Hutchinson, the Ukrainians and Liz Cheney make the Maga elites (misnomer) so uncomfortable, because looking into the face of real courage shatters the lie they get from watching Vin Diesel and Stallone. The difference is one is real world and the other fantasy. Maga elites (there it is again) can’t embody true courage, so there only hope is to try to reduce the best among us so they can seem a little braver in comparison.