Senator Robert Menendez's Prosecution Is My Vindication... And It Has Huge Implications For American Foreign Policy
There’s nothing I love more than saying “I told you so.” Not money, not sex, not even revenge or patriotism.
And this week brought news that my vindication on l’affair Menendez, though delayed, was not denied:
The Justice Department indicted Senator Robert Menendez alongside his Armenian wife and three others, with taking bribes from Egyptian intelligence.
I had been told to expect a Menendez indictment in the early days of the Biden presidency. “My heart is ready but has been broken and too soon made glad before,” I said, wistful of my misspent twenties when I tried, in vain, to do the right thing.
You can even watch a video about me discussing Menendez’s corruption in 2015.
Well, well, well, well.
Happy are those who listen to The Chuck. I just wish it didn’t take a decade to figure it out!
I was, of course, lied about, defamed, by the usual— and increasingly powerless — neocon chattering classes who defended Senator Robert Menendez due, in large measure, to his strong ties to Israel. Sure enough, his financial supporters included Zionists of every stripe:
“Robert Menendez Legal Expense Trust also received contributions from the entertainment magnate Haim Saban, a pro-Israel Democratic donor, and his wife, Cheryl, as well as from the real estate billionaire Mortimer B. Zuckerman.”
These media supporters included David Weigel and Ben Smith, who now work for Semafor which was funded by indicted criminal Sam Bankman-Fried and other Chisraeli agents. These attacks also included the Red State weirdos who got funding from Paul Singer, the same pro-Israel, pro-Russia billionaire.
One of the major reasons I left journalism for investing is that it was awfully hard to get paid for being right in journalism. That’s less true in investing. You have to worry about people, including close friends, cheating you in business. But that’s survivable. There’s always lawyers.
The story of how I got to be involved with Senator Robert Menendez is rather convoluted but basically I was a freelancer for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. (God forgive me. I was young — and dumb and ambition!)
Se habla español so I translated the testimony of the alleged Dominican prostitutes who had come to the Caller to tell their story. I even met up with a few ex(? ha!) CIA guys who had been tracking Melgen’s planes. I wrote a few articles detailing all the criminal stuff that Menendez and Melgen were doing.
To their credit Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus gave me credit for being early and often on the story after calling me “the infamous man in journalism.”
Senator Robert Menendez was allowed to lie and claim that this was a far fetched plot by Cuban intelligence to frame him. His lies went all the Washington Post where Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Leonnig — to her shame — carried them.
My reporting was later vindicated when the DOJ and the FBI admitted just as I reported that Menendez and Melgen had slept with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic and that they suspected some of them were underage. I predicted that Menendez would be indicted and sure enough he was — alongside Salomon Melgen.
Melgen was convicted for defrauding Medicare — how many eye doctors do you know of who have private jets? — before he ultimately had his sentence commuted by President Trump Jared Kushner. The prosecutors who worked on this effort were rightly disgusted by the commutation, calling it a “kick in the teeth.”
Menendez narrowly escaped Justice in large measure because the Trump people appreciated his grift. He had long done “oy vey for pay” and the pro-Israel lobby came to defend him. Curiously Menendez even got represented by the very pro-Israel Abbe Lowell, who would later go on to represent Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden.
There was a hung jury when Menendez went to trial and the Trump Justice Department [sic] declined to prosecute him because of his pro-Israel stance.
The juror who helped hang that jury? She later appeared at Menendez’s victory party in 2018. Watch the video for yourself. There are rumors she received an apartment for her vote. I reported this to the FBI.
At times this corruption grew both monstrous and even cartoonish.
Robert Menendez is 69 years old. A year younger, in fact, than my dear father who is enjoying his retirement. He should be enjoying his grandkids and not messing about with cash and gold bullion.
One rather curious detail? DNA lifted from the bribes (really!)
The more interesting question is why Menendez was allowed to behave so corruptly for so long.
Here I think an explanation is warranted.
Menendez has repeatedly threatened Turkiye, our closest (real) ally in the region and Turks are celebrating his demise with front page coverage.
For me, well, the feelings are a bit more complicated. One of the things that will shock you is how extremely corrupt people are at the highest levels of our politics.
You run into these people — the Ken Paxtons, the Eric Schmidts, and Robert Menendezes of the world — and it gets more and more disturbing.
Who do you report this stuff to when the FBI itself is compromised?
You have to clean up the FBI and the Senate.
Fortunately President Joe Biden is doing just that.