Foreign aid feeds senators

Give dictators billions and they kick back millions

Biden had Democrat Senator Bob Menendez indicted for corruption again to give Biden cover for persecuting President Trump and other Republicans. Biden will not stop at Trump. Never Trumpers are next. Every dictator punishes turncoats no matter which way they turn because they never can be trusted.

The real crime of the Never Trumpers is their failure to punish Obama for using the FBI to spy on President Trump. They also failed to punish Biden for withholding a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine unless the nation fired the prosecutor looking into his son collecting bribes for him. That failure to penalize the deep state encouraged more police state abuse.

Never Trumpers cheered when Pelosi impeached Trump for asking Zelensky for an investigation of the Biden Crime Family. How dare Trump go after corruption!

Therein lies the problem. Washington is a little racketeer-influenced corrupt town. How’s that saying go? Ah yes, government money is like holy water; everyone takes a little.

And by a little, I mean a millionth of the money because a millionth of a trillion bucks is a million dollars. These dudes now spend $6 trillion a year. It only takes a few millionths to make you a very rich man. And they actually take a lot more than that.

That Menendez is a crook is beyond any reasonable doubt, which explains why prosecutors tanked his last indictment and will tank this one. It is all for show. In fact, there is evidence that this may be a re-election ploy because they did the same thing to him in 2018 and voters re-elected him. It’s New Jersey. The state hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate in 50 years.

Trump made a lot of money so he could enter politics. The crooks enter politics to make a lot of money.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is an ATM. Biden chaired it. Kerry chaired it. Menendez chaired it until this unfortunate legal thingy popped up last week like a pimple on prom night.

What attracts these crooks is foreign aid. The USA gives $39 billion a year to crooked governments in other countries. Naturally, they kick some of the money back, which is why we spend more on foreign aid than we do NASA.

Space may be the final frontier, but until Captain Kirk can talk the Klingons into running a money laundering operation for powerful senators, those phasers are going to be stuck on stun because there is no money for ammo, captain.

All this somehow leads us to Egypt. No, Klingons and ancient aliens did not erect the pyramids. But American dollars have infected Egypt.

NYT reported, “After decades as one of the world’s largest recipients of United States foreign aid, the Egyptian government was nervous about how long the largess would continue at that level. But when the United States cut a sliver of the aid in 2017 over Egypt’s grim human rights record, stunning Cairo, Egyptian officials found an ally in Senator Robert J. Menendez of New Jersey.

“He happened to be the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position that Egypt evidently felt could help its footing in Washington. And even as he accused the Trump administration of being lax when it came to Egypt, prosecutors say he was doing favors for Egyptian officials who had gotten to know him through his then-girlfriend — signing off on arms sales and secretly helping it lobby Washington to release funding.

“In return, according to a federal indictment of Mr. Menendez unsealed on Friday, Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, checks and bars of gold.

“It was a price that Egyptian officials clearly felt was worth paying.”

How interesting. Americans for decades have looked down their noses at those little corrupt countries run by strongmen who use the state police to spy on and arrest political opponents. Now thanks to Biden, we realize that we were describing our own government.

Public service does not attract men like Menendez or Biden or Kerry or plenty of Republicans, too, to Washington. Money does. You can attract more flies with sugar than you can vinegar. Uncle Sugar attracts flies and human insects as well.

Menendez’s co-defendant is his second wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, whom he married in 2020.

As the Inquirer politely put it, “She has a master’s degree in French from New York University and raised two children in Bergen County. She wasn’t working when she began dating Menendez but started an international consulting company, Strategic International Business Consultants, shortly after, in June 2019.”

Well, if you are going to go into international consulting, it helps to hook-up with a past and future chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And the story remarkably said just that, “The indictment alleges that Nadine Menendez received a luxury car, gold bars, help with her mortgage, and consultant fees for facilitating meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials. Prosecutors charge that the couple received bribes in exchange for Menendez’s political influence.

“Nadine Menendez was also present for a series of meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials, where the government alleges the couple traded influence for bribes. In March 2020 she allegedly texted an Egyptian official, ‘anytime you need anything, you have my number and we will make everything happen.’”

Anytime you need anything, you have my number and we will make everything happen — it reads like the business card of a pimp.

And she is. She pimped him out.

Jonathan Turley made an interesting observation. He said Menendez broke the Goldilocks Rule of taking just enough wetting the beak (to use a Godfather II term).

Turley wrote, “The question is whether this level of corruption is now enough for Democrats. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently suggested a type of Goldilocks rule for corruption. He warned that people in Washington had better be careful if they want to crack down on the Biden family’s influence-peddling.

“He said, “If that’s the new criteria, there are a lot of folks in a lot of industries — not just in politics — where people have family members and relationships and they’re trying to parlay and get a little influence and benefit in that respect. That’s hardly unique.’

“It would appear that the question is not corruption, but when a little corruption is just right.”

A veteran West Virginia legislator told me how he avoided jail when the feds convicted a slew of crooks, including the governor, in the late 1980s and 1990s. His mentor told him of lobbyists: eat their food and drink their booze just don’t take their money.

Corruption stems from a government that spends too much, gets too little service in return, and keeps track of nothing. In his day, Willie Sutton robbed banks because that is where the money is.

Today he would be Senator William Francis Sutton Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because the money is bigger and the possibility of jail time is minuscule.