By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on August 3, 2023
photo: Bill Hackwell
It is not exceptional for a U.S. senator to be investigated for corruption, but it is a record for him to have to appear in court twice for similar cause, in less than a decade.
Robert Menendez, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, escaped jail in 2018 when his corruption trial was declared a mistrial. Distracted by legal technicalities, the jury failed to reach agreements on the dozen fraud and bribery charges the Justice Department had documented against Menendez after years of investigation.
The New Jersey senator, a Democrat of Cuban descent, was accused of receiving $750,000 in the form of campaign donations, gifts, private plane rides with underage mistresses and lavish vacations paid for by a benefactor in exchange for advocating on his behalf. Menendez remained on Capitol Hill, but his dangerous “friend,” Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the largest Medicare fraud case in U.S. history. In a twist worthy of the series House of Cards , a zany parody of what really goes on in the White House, Donald Trump commuted Melgen’s sentence in 2020 as the last act of his presidency; a gesture, he said, “in reciprocation of the request of Senator Menendez and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Florida.”
Now what? The Justice Department and the FBI are investigating whether Menendez or his new wife received undeclared gifts of a luxury car and a Washington apartment, gifts from another friend of the Senator who is also under criminal investigation, according to a lengthy report in The New York Times published Tuesday.
Prosecutors have advanced the couple’s connection to a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hana, with whom the senator not only appears to share “an affinity for Cuban cigars,” according to the Times. The plot has brought to light the ease with which the businessman has secured permits to control, with no prior experience, a million-dollar halal food market and the mysterious sale of gold bullion, owned by Mrs. Menendez, who, before marrying the senator in October 2020, had filed for bankruptcy.
Deliberately obscured in this scandalous saga is something that is in plain sight: Menendez’s penchant for bad company began long before the ophthalmologist scandal and is closely linked to the most egregious dealings against the country of his parents’ birth, Cuba.
A New York Observer investigation (“A Senator With Tough Friends,” 6/11/06) showed that Menendez not only received donations from contributors who have been called in during terrorism investigations against Cuba, but contributed financially to the defense of one accused of such acts. Early in his career – during the 1980s, when he was mayor of Union City – he gave money for the legal defense of Eduardo Arocena, sentenced to two life sentences for the murder in New York of a Cuban diplomat accredited to the U.N. and for planting bombs in public places in the United States.
Although Menendez is familiar with the Cuban mafia and is from New Jersey, the setting of The Sopranos, he seems to fit better in the central character of the Netflix series that showed Washington politicians as power-hungry hyenas, and Congress, as a shady place where you are never far from blackmail and backstabbing. He knows how to negotiate and threaten legislators so that a bill will or will not have enough support, and maneuver darkly to blackmail the White House.
Anyone who follows U.S.-Cuba relations is aware that Menendez tried to impede the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba and has managed to intimidate Biden’s entourage to maintain Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy against the government of President Miguel Diaz-Canel. He usually conditions the approval of laws and resolutions of his own party in the Senate and the decisions of the International Relations Committee in that chamber to the acceptance of more and more sanctions against the island. His enemies do not say so. In an interview for a Miami channel ( Americateve, 11/3/21), he took credit for the Democratic administration’s strategy to strangle the Cuban people and, in particular, to prevent remittances, visas and health care in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
The U.S. prosecutor who charged Robert Menendez in the case linked to the Florida ophthalmologist said at the trial six years ago that the lawmaker “sold his Senate office for a life of luxury.” He had a mountain of evidence, but the senator managed to evade justice and return to his old ways in the U.S. Congress, like the protagonist of House of Cards.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days, looking into a camera, Menendez says like Frank Underwood, “My real job is to keep the mud moving.”
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English