Gold Bar Bob convicted (Update: Jonathan Turley says DC pols turned their backs on Bob because his type of corruption was so gauche)
/
I was away today, and just saw this good news:
Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez guilty on all charges in federal corruption trial
Unlike the recent trial of another politician, Menendez was actually guilty of a crime (s): selling his office, and accepting bribes to influence foreign policy. Further, the man was a crook while he was mayor of Union City from 1986-1992, and continued wallowing in graft for the next three years as he made his way up the Jersey Democrqat political machine. Yes, he was just following a time-honored tradition of New Jersey pols, but stashing gold bars in shoes in the closet and hundreds of thousands of cash in his wife’s own closet(s) was beyond the pale, even for the Garden State. Or so it was declared, once he got caught.
Just to balance things out, on the west coast, the Menendez brothers are claiming that newly discovered evidence entitles them to a new trial after 30 years of incarceration. Two for one, so to speak.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Washington elites appear to look down upon Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez for his “prehistoric” corruption style.
A jury found Menendez guilty of all 16 counts of federal corruption and bribery charges relating to the Egyptian government and three New Jersey businessmen paying him thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars in exchange for information. Turley said the senator’s form of corruption is old-school, as opposed to modern corruption, which often takes the form of influence-peddling.
“His form of corruption views in the beltway as virtually prehistoric,” Turley said Tuesday. “I mean, the idea of getting envelopes filled with cash and cars is really sort of Capone-era corruption stuff. I mean, in some ways, some people have contempt just for the lack of sophistication. That’s not how corruption works anymore… Corruption is influence-peddling, like we’ve seen in the Hunter Biden case, where you have all of these rather curious and dubious positions with millions of dollars being passed through accounts. This is really something that Washington has long ago turned its back on.
