Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is refusing to step down after he was indicted for a massive bribery and political corruption scheme. The Senator is accused of using his position to secure special treatment for his friends in Egypt in exchange for cash and gifts totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is refusing to step down after he was indicted for a massive bribery and political corruption scheme. The senator is accused of using his position to secure special treatment for his friends in Egypt in exchange for cash and gifts, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Joining me to talk about that is the best guy in the progressive business. Farron Cousins can always bring information that matters. Farron, this story is shocking. This is the second time in 10 years for Bob and he barely escaped last time, but the facts are basically the same facts, the same mo except this time he’s got his wife involved in the business, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. His wife, when you look through this indictment, it almost seems like she’s the one who set a lot of this in motion. She introduced him to her friends from Egypt and then, oh, well, we need some favors, and you’re the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And from there it just snowballed into this massive pay to play, really.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: He was getting gifts. I mean.
Mike Papantonio: Here’s the list. $450,000 in just gold around there. Gold bars that have fingerprints of the cats who gave it to him. Cash, what, $500,000 in cash sewn into his clothes. Stuffed under the mattress. Hidden in the wife’s jewelry. On top of that, what is it, he gets, they’re making house payments for him. He gets a Mercedes. And the guy’s taking the position, oh, I’m just a victim because I’m Latino. I mean, isn’t that revolting? Isn’t that disgusting? Rather than just saying, look, you know what, I got caught. You know, he comes from, what is it called, a union city up in New Jersey, A big mob area, by the way. So he’s learned the mob business and he’s pretty good at it, apparently. What do you think?
Farron Cousins: Look, he has no choice at this point, but to resign. You do finally have more and more Democratic senators that have come out this week that said, yes, obviously he deserves the presumption of innocence till trial, but he’s gotta get outta the Senate. And that’s absolutely true. And when you look, obviously he does deserve the presumption of innocence, but I mean, he pretty much had everything except for big bags with dollar signs on them in his house.
Mike Papantonio: With film of them. Here it is.
Farron Cousins: I mean, gold bars. We’re talking about real cartoon villain here. Money just popping out of his jackets, he had so much of it.
Mike Papantonio: He’s got the same criminal lawyer that Hunter Biden has, and I know Lowell. I mean, he ain’t, he is not a magician. And that’s what you’d have to be on here. His position, well, I just saved cash, not on $180,000 a year, is what he’s making. His wife had a no-show job that was also part of the deal. So between them, if they’re making $250,000, he’s got almost $500,000 in cash. He’s got 400, gold bars that are worth $150,000. And then you add all this stuff that’s in addition to that. And I don’t know whether he has much of a defense. Now, if it’s tried in New Jersey, he might, because they’re used to trying cases, mobster type cases up there. But there was something that struck me about this. This came on the, the week before the DOJ got absolutely obliterated in hearings, I thought, because the answers to some of the questions weren’t good. Not that the questions were so smart, but the answers to the question about some of what the DOJ’s been up to. What did they do in this situation? Why did they fail to do this and this? It looked bad, the totality of it. But this comes the week after that. And you gotta say, I wonder, is this DOJ rehab, you think?
Farron Cousins: It might be, but we also gotta talk about what he did. Not just with the money he had, but he’s basically giving Egypt government secrets. You know, sharing top secret information with them in exchange for this cash. He’s steering these massive weapons sales to Egypt, all because of his position on that committee. So it.
Mike Papantonio: And he is trying to fix prosecution too. He tried to handpick a prosecutor that was his pal, that he thought, well, this prosecutor, he’s gonna let my guy go and I’m gonna get, the prosecutor’s name, Sellinger. But he did, Sellinger did the right thing. What I thought was so interesting is at the press conference with the DOJ, the fellow running the press conference said, congratulations Sellinger, you didn’t sell out. Really? Why would you even say that? Congratulations, you didn’t get pulled into the mob scene. As if that’s a big victory for the DOJ. That was really a weird thing to say. But Menendez, he’s defiant, isn’t he?
Farron Cousins: He really is. And that obviously is also one of the more disgusting pieces of this. And the Democrats need to be much, much louder with calling for his resignation. We remember the Al Franken thing.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, of course.
Farron Cousins: You know, we were out there that same day too, saying, listen, it doesn’t matter what you personally think of Al Franken, whether you love him, whether you think what he did was wrong, and he should resign. We said that, and we’ve known Al Franken for decades through Air America.
Mike Papantonio: Well, we used to work with him, with Air America.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. But we said, listen, he’s gotta resign. And this is no different. And the Democrats need to be louder. There needs to be more of them. As of us sitting here, Chuck Schumer said, I’m not gonna do that. It’s ridiculous.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Well, it is. It looks so bad. But hey, the good news is Santos came out and supported him. Did you see that? Santos came and said, not so quick. Maybe he’s just being targeted because he’s Latino. Santos, do you want Santos on your side in this? But that, he’s out there saying, hey, look, I don’t see anything wrong here. Of course, he doesn’t see anything wrong. The guy’s a thug. He’s a criminal. Yeah. I don’t think he’s going to resign. He might, who knows. The discussion right now is innocent until proven guilty. Look, they got fingerprints, they got DNA. What I find interesting about this article too, about not the article, but the story, is the DOJ found this stuff a year ago. Did you know that?
Farron Cousins: I did not know that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They found it in 2022 and they sat on it all this time. I think that’s interesting. That’s why I’m saying the release of the indictment, the timing of the indictment was right after the DOJ looks like a clown show. I mean, it looks like the whole DOJ is a nothing more than a clown show the week, two weeks before in hearings. And so this comes right on the foot of that. I don’t know if it’s gonna help him all that much.
