November 17, 2017
Menendez trial: An Obama failure to punish an enemy
Bad as the 18 corruption charges against New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez were, the original motive behind the Justice Department's prosecution against him was worse. That's worth remembering as the news of his hung-jury trial probably amounts to an acquittal, given that most jurors (8-2) thought the charges of funds-for-favors were unproven and prosecutors may be reluctant to retry against those odds.
According to the New York Daily News:
Prosecutors assembled a mountain of evidence that Menendez traded hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and campaign contributions from a scam-artist Florida ophthalmologist for official favors. No conviction.
The Washington Post summed up the charges as thus:
Prosecutors said Menendez took gifts from Melgen, including a luxury hotel stay, private jet flights and campaign donations, in exchange for which he tried to help Melgen get U.S. visas for his girlfriends, intervened in the doctor’s $8.9 million billing dispute with Medicare, and assisted with a port security contract of the doctor’s in the Dominican Republic.
It sure sounds like he was steeped well in a pay-for-play Washington swamp culture, for what it's worth. Like so many others.
But as Andrew McCarthy, in an exceptionally astute analysis, points out, the telling point here is in the original reason for the charges at all: Menendez angered President Obama, and banana-republic style, went after him through the Justice Department as payback.
Policywise, Menendez wasn't that bad as Democrats go. He was against Obama's Iran Deal, something that was cooked up by Ben Rhodes and shoved down our throats with admitted lies to ensure that Obama left with some sort of legacy, even as the whole thing meant selling America down the river. The deal's secret air flights loaded with billions in cash, drug-dealer-style, for the mullahs' benefit, has only served to embolden them as the cash has since made its way to arms and mayhem.
He also opposed Obama's sellout to Cuba, forking over good relations with the Castro brothers in late 2014 in exchange for nothing. Since then, horrible repressive measures have been taken against dissidents, something Obama and the ever-garrulous Rhodes have been silent about.
McCarthy, on PJ Media in 2015, wrote:
Obama’s Justice Department, which features the first attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress (for obstructing the House’s investigation of the outrageous Fast & Furious scandal), is the most politicized in American history – practicing discriminatory law-enforcement that stays its hand against friends (see, e.g., its treatment of New Black Panther Partyvoter intimidation, Solyndra fraud, and the Obama 2008 campaign’s large-scale campaign finance violations) while punishing critics, scapegoats, and others who dare to cross the president (see, e.g., treatment of Dinesh D’Souza’s de minimis campaign finance violation; of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, producer of the anti-Muslim video the administration fraudulently blamed for the Benghazi massacre; and of Standard & Poor's, squeezed for a $1.37 billion settlement in a retaliatory suit Justice filed after S&P downgraded the U.S. credit-rating).
The telling point, he adds, is that Menendez's collaborator in his misdeeds, one former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, never got charged despite his involvements in intervening on behalf of Menendez in his pay-for-play activity.
The fact that most of the jury believed Menendez when he said it was based on friendship, not payoffs, was understandable, even if concerning, given that practically any politician who ever did what Menendez did would be off the hook. But the same argument could not be made for the unindicted Reid, who was nothing more than a political coeval of Menendez's, doing Menendez's dirty work for him in exchange for influence. Yet Reid was never indicted - because he never crossed Obama.
The bigger problem here is that the Obama administration engaged in raw political payback, comparable to a Chicago ward pol, and that is something that merits judicial action much more than Menendez.
THE ENDLESSLY HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it is “ALL NEW”…. Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation of plundering banks!
It’s Obama’s wet dream!
OPIOID ADDICTION IN AMERICA:
OBAMA AND HIS CRONIES IN BIG PHARMA AT WORK!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty.
BARACK OBAMA:
THE PSYCHOPATH WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR FUNDED BY HIS CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS AND REELECTED FOR A THIRD TERM BY MEXICO
MICHAEL BARONE:
The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story
UNDERWAY: THE OBAMA COUP FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE… for 8 years he laid the groundworks for his Muslim-style dictatorship.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/seth-barron-obama-and-building-of.html
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing .”
Silence on Sleaze-Bob
Menendez
The verdict is in.
I pronounce Democrat leaders, left-wing feminists and Beltway journalists guilty of gross negligence and hypocrisy over a dirty rotten sleazeball in their midst.
For the past 11 weeks, Bob Menendez has been on trial for 18 counts of bribery, fraud and corruption involving nearly $1 million in gifts and donations. The jury remained deadlocked as of Tuesday. A new Media Research Center analysis reported that ABC, CBS and NBC devoted 40 times more of their morning and evening TV newscast coverage this past week to Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore's alleged sexual assault accusers than to the ongoing federal trial of one of the Democrats' most powerful, visible and entrenched figures on Capitol Hill.
Four years ago, when the FBI raided the Florida home of creepy Democratic donor and eye doctor Salomon Melgen, Menendez suddenly remembered that he had failed to pay back his "hermano" $60,000 for private-jet flights to the Caribbean -- where Melgen owns a tony home in the private Casa de Campo resort.
As the party-boy buds tell it, their two decades of favor-trading were innocent, brotherly acts of affection. That little reimbursement thing for joy rides shuttling Menendez, his girlfriend, his son and his son's office manager around the world? It "fell through the cracks," the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and lawyer explained.
Oopsie.
As government investigators discovered, the "friendship" entailed much more than backslaps and beach nights. Melgen was convicted this spring on 67 counts of massive Medicare fraud totaling $90 million. Prosecutors allege Menendez and his staff pulled strings and put pressure on public officials to back off Melgen's billing blow-up. Menendez asserts he did nothing illegal and acted not out of obligation to a high-dollar donor, but because of his sincere policy concerns about how Medicare is run.
How noble.
My favorite M&M production involves what I dubbed the 36DD visa program. This is not in dispute: Menendez and his staff pressured the State Department to expedite the foreign tourist and student visa approval processes for a bevy of buxom foreign beauties. One of them, Brazilian actress and porn pinup star Juliana Lopes Leite (a.k.a. "Girlfriend 1"), had her F-1 student visa application moved to the top of the pile in 2008 after Menendez and his staff intervened as a favor to model-lovin' Melgen.
Another, Rosiell Polanco-Suera, testified that her rejected visa application (along with her sister's) received reconsideration and instant approval after Melgen promised to "fix it" by reaching out to Menendez.
Flying the crony skies on taxpayer time. Systematically bilking sick old people. Turning America's visa programs into an international dating app for Dem donors.
Ho-hum.
Top Democrat leaders, so quick to call for the resignation of GOP candidates convicted in the court of public opinion, remain noncommittal about where they'll stand if Menendez is convicted. Liberal media partisans are deliberately ignoring the story because they are incapacitated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Women's advocates looked the other way at Justice Department court filings on "specific, corroborated allegations that defendants Menendez and Melgen had sex with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic."
The collective silence on Sleaze-Bob -- busy raising more than $6 million for his re-election campaign and legal defense fund -- roars louder than Melgen's private jet engines.
Turns out "The Resistance" can't and won't resist a crapweasel when Democratic Party coffers and the balance of power in Washington are at stake.
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