Why Menendez? Why Now?

The Menendez story has disappared from the headlines after only a day, for reasons that may be related to what I talked about in yesterdays's post -- his case is a little too similar to Joe's, and maybe even related to it, something the Justice Department maybe should have reflected on before they made the indictment public. Just about the only insightful take from anyone during the story's brief moment in the news cycle was from Jesse Watters Friday night, when he asked, "Why now?"

So the question is, why was the Biden administration taking down Menendez at all, and why now? Because the FBI raided Menendez's house last year. Menendez has been walking around Washington knowing Biden's agents have the stack of his gold bars ready to drop at any minute. God, Biden must have been squeezing Bob.

The photo at the top of this post shows Menendez and his trophy wife Nadine in May 2022, just before the FBI searched his house for the cash and gold bars, which took place in June. The G-men tossed Mar-a-Lago just two months later, in August, but they released photos of alleged classified document folders the next day. Why did they keep the Menendez raid quiet for over a year?

On one hand, poor Sen Menendez outdoes trashy even for New Jersey (I say this as a Jersey boy myself). I think one explanation for "why Menendez" is that Biden thinks Menendez is a vulgarian even by Joe's own standards, and he gives graft a bad name. At least Joe's second wife has a doctorate, tasteful hair, and she doesn't flaunt her boobs the way Nadine does.

So that may go some distance to explain "Why Menendez?" Menendez doesn't know how to play the game as well as Joe, and Caesar is rubbing it in his face. But another factor in Menendez's story is that Menendez sold himself remarkably cheap. The big thing that struck me about the pictures of the cash in envelopes and gold bars was that Menendez couldn't spend any of it.

Yeah, he could take a bunch of twenties, buy dinner with them, and not get noticed, but we're talking in the range of half a million dollars, and you can't deposit that in a bank, and you can't spend it all at once, without setting off alarms. The same with gold bars. You can't turn a gold bar into something spendable without having to report it to the IRS. So the cash stayed in envelopes with the gold bars in Menendez's closet, because there was nothing else he could do with it.

Or more accurately, Menendez couldn't figure out how to launder it. He was too much of a small-timer, in other words. They don't make New Jersey jokes for nothing. The same applies to the $60,000 Mercedes. The plebs can buy an F-150 for that amount. Why did Menendez even waste his time with that? Some Kazakh oligarchs bought Hunter a Porsche for $142,300, and that was just a lagniappe. Menendez simply made it easy, and Joe squashed him like a bug because he could.

The current estimate from informed observers of the Biden family boodle is in the range of $20-50 million, but for a dozen people with expensive tastes over a period of decades, I think this will turn out to be low. To launder that much money took some level of expertise from Hunter and his associates, although let's remember that Joe was in Menendez's position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as early as 2001, when Hunter was just a junior lobbyist.

Joe had to have been grafting at a higher level than Menendez even then. Biden Inc has been in business since Hunter was a schoolboy, and we have a great deal to learn.

Why now? Jesse Watters advances the theory that Menendez, corrupt as he is, nevertheless was in favor of policies endorsed by Venezuelans victimized by the regime there, as well as his fellow Cubans, and this went against Biden's handlers and their priorities. But this was nothing new; this piece in Politico from 2021 points out that as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez has always been a rival center of power. It was probably just as much to Joe's benefit to go on squeezing Bob indefinitely. If Joe knocks Menendez out of the running permanently, he has to deal with an unpredictable new state of affairs.

It may be that even if the Republican efforts to expose the Biden Inc graft turn out to be little more than pinpricks, they're pinpricks on Joe's massively inflated self-esteem. Joe, after all, is Caesar. Unfortunately, even Caesar is having trouble prevailing against Trump, and so far, four indictments have done nothing but increase Trump's standing in the polls, while none of them has made the Republican congressional inquiries go away.

So I'm inclined to think poor Bob Menendez, a small-time grafter from New Jersey who couldn't even figure out how to spend his skim, was a handy target of opportunity that Joe could squash when he'd have much preferred to have been able to squash someone bigger. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Menendez as a little guy. He says he'll fight back, and I wish him luck.