Gold bars, guns, cash stuffed into a coat and favors for a foreign government – the new indictment of Bob Menendez, the Democratic US senator from 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 – and the purported scheme all too predictable – in a country whose judiciary has been effectively telling politicians that corruption is perfectly legal.
Evoking memories of Abscam and the Keating Five scandals, the details of the Menendez indictment are certainly anomalous for their cartoonish color. 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 “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” a trio of businessmen “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt”.
