That is the fact that former New Jersey Democratic Senator, Robert Menendez, was sentenced last week to 11 years in federal prison on numerous counts of corruption, including the very first case in US history of a member of Congress being found guilty of acting as an agent for a foreign government.
Robert Menendez rose to political power in a system that was already marked by widespread corruption. Later he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served between and He was later elected to the position, he held it until he resigned in disgrace from office last year under federal indictment, and not only indictment but trial and not only trial, but guilty verdict of about 16 charges.
This is a massive case of political corruption in the United States. We are talking about the only elected member of the United States Congress ever to have been found guilty of the criminal charge of acting as an agent for a foreign nation. The foreign nation in this case was Egypt. I said that Bob Menendez comes from a context in which there were already allegations of corruption. It becomes something of a great tragedy. It is a warning to us all, but the significance of it has been largely missed by the larger culture, probably just because of the avalanche, indeed, the incredible flood of stories and headlines that have been coming out, especially in the first days of the Trump administration.
How exactly does something like this happen? And once you look at the facts of this story, that question looms even larger. So Bob Menendez was in the state legislature after being a mayor there in New Jersey. He then is in the United States House of Representatives. He has a fairly conservative record when it comes to foreign policy, very typical of someone whose parents were refugees from Cuba, but on other issues, very liberal.
On other issues, he just went with the times. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in the s, only to turn around and vote for the legalization of same-sex marriage, a matter of about a generation later. He had that brush with corruption charges going all the way back to This led to a trial on corruption charges.
