The announcement recently from Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) that he will resign from his U.S. Senate seat in the wake of his recent conviction in a federal corruption trial is welcome news for Congress. But the trial verdict and his removal from office shouldn’t be the end of the story.
Congress needs to reexamine every decision and piece of legislation the senator has influenced over the years to determine whether the result was being driven by unethical motivations. Anything he touched is now suspect – leaving us to wonder about his motivations as he managed legislative business.
The extent and brazenness of Menendez’s crimes is astonishing. In his trial, the federal prosecutor said that Menendez “put his power up for sale” and that he had done so much wrong while in office that it would take more than five hours to sum it up. In the end, he was convicted on 16 counts that included “bribery, extortion, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent.” According to court documents, Menendez, the former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was “involved in a five-year conspiracy to accept gold bars, luxury items and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for official political favors for friends linked to the governments of Egypt and Qatar.”
The details were shocking. Testimony “focused on one particular scheme in which Menendez’s co-defendant Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman from the Garden State, is accused of paying bribes to the Senator through his wife, Nadine, in exchange for helping him lock down a lucrative monopoly on certification of halal meat imported into Egypt.” It is likely that the Senator will appeal any decision, but his recent decision to quit the Senate in August is quite an admission of guilt.
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One might reasonably question why Sen. Menendez opposed a law to strengthen reporting requirements on foreign lobbying. As reported by NBC News, in 2020, Menendez also “single-handedly blocked a bipartisan effort to strengthen the law regulating foreign influence in Washington.” According to NBC, “two congressional aides said it was clear that Menendez was objecting for himself, not for another senator.” It doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude that the Senator was not a fan of the stricter criminal penalties in the proposed bill that may have applied to his conduct.
Menendez’s conviction also calls into question his efforts to repeatedly help another foreign company, Bermuda-based Bacardi. The Senator has led efforts to renew the controversial Rum Tax Cover-Over provision that effectively helps only Bacardi. The Cover Over allows for excise tax collections on imported rum to be given to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), but then much of that money is given right back to Bacardi in the form of production subsidies. Although the provision is marketed as support for the struggling economies of the two islands, economists have widely panned the provision as an unjustified giveaway. The Cato Institute described it as “macabre cronyism.” And according to the Center for Investigative Journalism, Bacardi has admitted that the provision hasn’t help to create new jobs for the islanders.
Menendez has also notably led efforts to pass the so-called No Stolen Trademarks Honored in America Act, which would also benefit exclusively – you guessed it – Bacardi. That legislation would step into a years-long dispute between Bacardi and France-based Pernod Ricard, who have been battling over the use of the trademark for Havana Club rum. Conveniently for Bacardi, Menendez’s bill would put the thumb on the scale in their favor, effectively stripping Pernod Ricard and its Cuban partner of their ability to use the Havana Club name. There is no justifiable reason for Congress to be weighing in on this legal fight between two foreign companies, but that hasn’t stopped Senator Sticky Fingers from using his influence to push Bacardi’s bill.
It is time for Congress to take a hard look at all the decisions and legislation that Menendez has had a part in, as well as the companies, like Bacardi, that were aided by those measures. At a minimum, Congress needs to make sure that there was no graft behind other controversial legislative items pushed by the senator. That will be needed to truly put this dark chapter behind us and help restore faith in a Congress that has been badly tainted by the actions of one of its own.
In the end, Senator Menendez’s legacy will be colored by this conviction, and it puts his whole career into a new perspective. After the conviction, the deference that many gave him when he supported legislation has been converted into doubt and skepticism.
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