The Menendez Mistrial The charges were thin against the Iran deal’s main Democratic critic.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-menendez-hung-jury-1510959789
Various ethicists are pronouncing shock that a federal jury failed to convict New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez on corruption charges, resulting in a mistrial Thursday after the jury ended up hung 10-2 for acquittal by one juror’s account. But our readers weren’t surprised, since we wrote as early as April 2015 that the charges were thin and deserved “more than a little skepticism.”
The New Jersey Democrat isn’t a model public servant, and the details of his support for his longtime friend Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach doctor and Democratic Party donor, aren’t pretty. He supported visa applications for Melgen’s overseas girlfriends—Brazilian actresses—and interceded with government officials on behalf of his business interests, among other things.
Few of these facts were in dispute during the nine-week trial, but the question for the jury was whether this behavior is a crime. Prosecutors claimed they amounted to quid-pro-quo corruption, but Mr. Menendez replied that they were routine constituent service or the result of a 25-year friendship.
Most of the jurors sided with the defense, and that’s not surprising after the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of bribery and corruption in its landmark Skilling (2010) and McDonnell (2016) cases. Prosecutors now have to prove a genuine bribe or a specific, clear quid-pro-quo. In Mr. Menendez’s intervention for Melgen over a Medicare coverage decision, the Department of Health and Human Services listened but rejected the Senator’s pleas. Melgen was convicted of Medicare fraud in a separate trial in April.
Prosecutors and political partisans claim it is becoming impossible to convict a politician of corruption, but that’s an exaggeration and ignores that prosecutors too often abused the law to put politicians in the dock. They so broadly defined “honest services” fraud that a jury could interpret it as a politician doing anything for a donor.
Mr. Menendez thanked the jury on Thursday, though it’s a shame he indulged in the race card by claiming that “certain elements of the FBI and of our state cannot understand, or even worse, accept that the Latino kid from Union City and Hudson County can grow up to be a United States Senator and be honest.” The late GOP Senator Ted Stevens could tell him that prosecutorial abuse doesn’t need race as a motive. (See Judge Emmet Sullivan nearby.)
The Menendez indictment also suffered from suspicious timing, coming as it did when the Senator was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and among the skeptics of Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. He had to step back from his committee role after the indictment. Prosecutors will want to retry the Senator to vindicate their charges, but the better part of the law and wisdom calls for dropping the case.
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