The News
Two weeks ago, when Bob Menendez made his semiannual post-verdict speech outside of a courthouse, he closed with some first-rate groveling.
“President Trump is right,” said the former New Jersey senator, who’d twice voted to convict that president for abuses of power. “This process is political and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”
Everybody knew what Menendez was doing. Trump has been sympathetic to politicians indicted over corruption charges, Republican and Democrat. He’d suggested that Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar was punished because he “wouldn’t play Crooked Joe’s Open Border game,” that former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was railroaded by “the Comey gang,” and (previously) that Menendez was targeted because he “wasn’t getting along too well” with fellow Democrats.
Ever since McDonnell v. United States, when a unanimous Supreme Court narrowed the definition of political bribery, it has been more difficult for prosecutors to prove that politicians are exchanging gifts for favors. But voters have taken an expansive view of what “corruption” means. And politicians have taken advantage of that.
In his confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. accused Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders of “corruption” and “accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry,” based on a misreading of campaign finance reports.
Sanders had never taken money from industry groups; he had taken small dollar donations from some of the 5.5 million people employed by the industry. But on Elon Musk’s X, Sanders was deluged with Kennedy fans who believed that the now-HHS Secretary had exposed a quid pro quo. Musk himself has advanced the idea that any government worker or politician who’s grown wealthy must have gotten that way through graft.
“We do find it rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth,” he said in a White House press spray with Trump this week. This was a reference to former USAID administrator Samantha Power, whose financial disclosures say exactly where her money came from.
The high-level idea here is that politicians are on the take unless they prove otherwise — and maybe even if they provide that proof. When a politician faces an investigation, prosecutors must be trying to bring him down because he stepped out of line. It’s a powerful monomyth, and pretty easy to invoke. Menendez hasn’t gotten the grace he wants from Trump yet, but New York Mayor Eric Adams just did, squelching the federal investigation into his gifts and campaign funds after aggressively courting Trump and his administration.
This may backfire badly on Adams. The resignation of Manhattan’s interim US attorney, who wrote in detail about the pressure from the new DOJ to let Adams off, has become an explosive scandal, ahead of a Democratic primary Adams was almost certainly going to lose. But you can understand why he tried it. The yearslong effort to convince people that their leaders are crooked has created amazing opportunities for the ones who are.