Bob Menendez

Bob Menendez

: Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: United States Senate

Overview

* Was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993-2006
* Has been a U.S. senator since 2006
* Strong advocate of “comprehensive immigration reform” which would provide a path-to-citizenship for illegal aliens
* Has been implicated in a number of scandals


Background

Born to Cuban immigrants in New York City on January 1, 1954, Bob Menendez earned a BA in politics from Saint Peter’s College (New Jersey) in 1976, and a JD from the Rutgers University School of Law in 1979. He was admitted to the New Jersey Bar in 1980 and promptly opened a private legal practice.

From 1974-78, Menendez was a member of the Union City, New Jersey board of education. In the late seventies, he began working for that town’s Democratic mayor, William Musto, whom he viewed as a political mentor and father figure. But Menendez eventually quit that job and testified against Musto in a 1981-82 corruption trial that saw his former employer convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Menendez went on to serve as a representative in the New Jersey House from 1988-90; mayor of Union City from 1986-92; a New Jersey state senator from 1990-92; and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993-2006. When Jon Corzine in January 2006 resigned from his U.S. Senate seat (representing New Jersey) in order to begin his tenure as the state’s newly elected governor, he appointed Menendez to take his place in the Senate for the remainder of that year. In November, Menendez won a general election for that same Senate seat, and he was re-elected in 2012 and 2018.

Widely regarded as a highly effective fundraiser, Menendez has raised millions of dollars for a number of Democratic political candidates—particularly Latinos—since 2000.

Corruption

Controversial Ties to a Nonprofit Agency

From 1993-2003, Menendez, as a landlord, rented out office space to a Union City nonprofit agency, collecting some $300,000 in rental fees during that period. In 1998 he assisted the same agency by persuading the Department of Health and Human Services to designate it as a federally qualified health center, thereby expanding the agency’s eligibility for federal grants (of which it received some $9.6 million worth during the ensuing eight years). Menendez stated, accurately, that he had rented his Union City property to the agency at (slightly) below-market rates; but his claim that he had not profited from the deal was false.

Alleged Extortion

In September 2006 a psychiatrist named Oscar Sandoval, who held some $1 million in government contracts to provide psychiatric services to a number of Hudson County, New Jersey public facilities, released a set of tape recordings from 1999 that implicated Menendez in serious corruption. On the tapes, Menendez’s close friend and fundraiser Donald Scarinci, a powerful attorney professing to speak on Menendez’s behalf, asks Sandoval to hire Dr. Vicente Ruiz (a staunch Democratic Party supporter with ties to Menendez) or face the prospect of losing all of his government contracts. Scarinci can be heard saying that “Menendez will consider that a favor” which would earn “protection” for Sandoval. As soon as the tapes were made public, the Menendez campaign cut its ties with Scarinci and denied that the latter had been acting on Menendez’s behalf.

“Grotesquely Inappropriate” Intervention on Behalf of Donors

In 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported that Menendez had written to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, asking him to approve the Crown Bank of Brick‘s acquisition of the failing New Jersey-based First Bank Americano (FBA), whose chairman and vice chairman were both major Menendez donors. (That acquisition, had it been approved, would have prevented the two executives from losing whatever was left of their investments in the bank.) All told, 8 of FBA’s 15 directors had given money to Menendez or his political action committee. Former federal bank regulator William Black, a Democrat, called Menendez’s letter “grotesquely inappropriate” insofar as it directly asked regulators to approve an application, rather than to simply place it under consideration. A scathing FDIC report indicated that FBA had engaged in numerous unsafe or unsound banking practices over the years, and the acquisition ultimately was disallowed.

Intern Who Was Illegal Alien/Registered Sex Offender

In December 2012 it was reported that one of the interns working in Senator Menendez’s office was an 18-year-old male immigrant from Peru who was living in the U.S. illegally and was a registered sex offender. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency first became aware of the man in October 2012, but the Department of Homeland Security instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after the November elections; Menendez, whose six-year Senate term was drawing to a close, was among those on the ballot. When news of the intern’s background finally broke five weeks after Election Day, Menendez denied having known anything about the directive to delay the young man’s arrest.

Undisclosed Political Gifts & Sex Parties

On August 1, 2012, the FBI opened an investigation into reports that Menendez had repeatedly traveled to the Dominican Republic (DR) to participate in “sex parties” featuring heavy drinking and multiple prostitutes, some of whom were underage girls. Menendez acknowledges having accepted free flights on the private plane of one of a longtime major Democratic donor, Miami ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen, for three visits he made to Melgen’s luxury resort in the DR in 2010.[1] Because the senator did not pay Melgen for those trips at that time, they technically constituted very large gifts that, according to Senate ethics rules, should have been publicly disclosed; but Menendez made no such disclosure.[2]

In the fall of 2012, the Daily Caller published reports of Menendez’s DR visits and the prostitution allegations. Not long thereafter—on January 4, 2013—the senator reimbursed Melgen $58,500 to cover the cost of two of the three trips in question. According to one report, that total represented more than one-third of Menendez’s liquid assets. As the Daily Caller noted, “The senator’s willingness to part with such a large amount of his personal funds … underscores the seriousness of charges he might otherwise have faced from the Senate Ethics committee.”

Menendez’s third trip to the Dominican Republic, said his spokeswoman Tricia Enright, was a fundraising venture that the senator’s campaign had reported to the Federal Election Commission. When asked by reporters in late January 2013 to respond to the prostitution allegations against him, Menendez said: “I have no comment and I’m not going to dignify that story.”

In early March 2015, the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it was preparing to bring criminal corruption charges against Menendez, alleging that he had used his Senate office to promote the business and personal interests of his friend and political supporter, the aforementioned Miami ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen, in exchange for luxury gifts, expensive vacations, and more than $750,000 in campaign donations. Responding to the charges, Menendez told reporters: “I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law And I am not going anywhere.”

On April 1, 2015, Menendez and Melgen were indicted on multiple counts of federal corruption. The 68-page indictment alleged that the senator had: (a) attempted, on Melgen’s behalf, to influence a State Department official in a dispute involving one of the doctor’s business interests in the Dominican Republic; (b) tried to help Melgen in a Medicare billing problem; and (c) mobilized his staff, at Melgen’s request, to secure visas for several young female paramours of the doctor. These included a Brazilian actress who had posed nude on the cover of Sexy magazine, a 20-year-old Ukrainian woman, and a 22-year-old Dominican model.  As columnist Michelle Malkin writes:

“This is not in dispute: Menendez and his staff pressured the State Department to expedite the foreign tourist and student visa approval processes for a bevy of buxom foreign beauties. One of them, Brazilian actress and porn pinup star Juliana Lopes Leite (a.k.a. ‘Girlfriend 1’), had her F-1 student visa application moved to the top of the pile in 2008 after Menendez and his staff intervened as a favor to … Melgen. Another, Rosiell Polanco-Suera, testified that her rejected visa application (along with her sister’s) received reconsideration and instant approval after Melgen promised to ‘fix it’ by reaching out to Menendez.”

With a public corruption trial of both Menendez and Melgen scheduled to begin on September 6, 2017, the DOJ on August 30 filed a court brief stating that Menendez’s claim that he had traveled on Melgen’s plane only three times “was a lie.” “The truth,” said DOJ, “is that Menendez and his personal guests had enjoyed more than a dozen flights on Melgen’s private jet, dating back at least as far as 2006—not a single one of which Menendez had paid for or reported on his annual financial disclosure forms…. But Menendez’s and Melgen’s lies to the public were aimed at covering up more than just flights. They were aimed at hiding a corrupt pact spanning seven years, in which Melgen showered many more things of value on the New Jersey Senator than just flights on a private jet, and Menendez reciprocated with official action advancing the South Florida eye doctor’s personal whims and business interests.”

In November 2017, Menendez’s federal corruption trial ended in a mistrial after the jury reported that it was hopelessly deadlocked. In January 2018, the Department Of Justice filed a notice that it planned to re-try Menendez on bribery and corruption charges. But less than two weeks later, the DOJ reversed itself and dropped its case against Menendez.

On April 26, 2018, the Senate Ethics Committee sent a public “letter of admonition” to Menendez, saying that he had “knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from” Salomon Melgen. To view the letter in its entirety, click here. To view some selected key excerpts, see the bulleted passages below:

  • The Committee has found that over a six-year period you [Menendez] knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from Dr. Melgen without obtaining required Committee approval, and that you failed to publicly disclose certain gifts as required by Senate Rule and federal law. Additionally, while accepting these gifts, you used your position as a Member of the Senate to advance Dr. Melgen’s personal and business interests. The Committee has determined that this conduct violated Senate Rules, federal law, and applicable standards of conduct. Accordingly, the Committee issues you this Public Letter of Admonition, and also directs you to repay the fair market value of all impermissible gifts not already repaid.
  • The Committee began its review of this matter in late 2012, and … reviewed 257 exhibits and the trial testimony of 57 witnesses…. Based upon the totality of the evidence, the Committee has concluded as follows:
    1. From 2006 through 2013, you accepted numerous things of value from Dr. Melgen, including, but not limited to, travel on private and commercial flights, a luxury hotel stay in Paris, and lodging on 19 occasions at a Dominican Republic villa. You did not pay fair market value for, or, where required, obtain necessary written approval from the Committee to accept these gifts.
    2. Over the course of several years, you failed to list gifts you had accepted from Dr. Melgen on your public Financial Disclosure Reports, as you were legally required to do.
    3. During the same time period in which you accepted these gifts, you used your position as a Member of the Senate to advance Dr. Melgen’s personal and business interests. At Dr. Melgen’s request, you:
    (a) Intervened in a matter where the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) found that Dr. Melgen had overbilled Medicare by more than $8.9 million. This intervention included persistent advocacy before multiple senior CMS officials over the course of three years, reaching, at its height, your meeting with the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
    (b) Advocated before federal agencies on behalf of ICSSI, a port security services company owned by Dr. Melgen. This advocacy included an in-person meeting with a senior official in which you requested that the U.S. Department of State intervene in a contract dispute between ICSSI and the Dominican Republic. During this meeting, you threatened to hold a public hearing and to call the official to testify if the State Department failed to resolve the matter. You also acted to protect ICSSI’s contract to provide scanning services in the Dominican Republic by requesting that U.S. Customs and Border Protection delay its planned donation of screening equipment.
    (c) Assisted foreign nationals obtain visas to visit Dr. Melgen in the United States, including, in one case, appealing directly to a U.S. ambassador to seek reconsideration of a visa denial.
  • Notably, you have not disputed the fact that you accepted numerous gifts from Dr. Melgen and took official actions related to his interests. Standing alone, your acceptance of and failure to disclose gifts violated Senate Rule 35 (Gifts), Senate Rule 34 (Public Financial Disclosure), and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as amended. Your repeated acceptance of private plane flights from Dr. Melgen is particularly troubling given that it coincided with the passage and implementation of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, a law passed in response to an ethics scandal and aimed, at least in part, at severely curtailing public officials’ acceptance of free travel on private planes.
  • A Senator is … expected to exercise discretion in accepting gifts, and be “particularly sensitive” not only to the frequency and value of gifts, but also to the “possible motives of the donor.” (Senate Ethics Manual, 2003 ed., at 21-22) You demonstrated disregard for these standards by placing your Senate office in Dr. Melgen’s service at the same time you repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from him. Your assistance to Dr. Melgen under these circumstances demonstrated poor judgment, and it risked undermining the public’s confidence in the Senate. As such, your actions reflected discredit upon the Senate.
  • Finally, the Committee considered the fact that your criminal trial did not result in a conviction. The criminal system, however, neither enforces nor supplants the Senate’s rules or standards of conduct, and the Committee’s action stands independent from that result. For the reasons set forth above, the Committee concludes that your actions violated Senate Rules and related statutes, and reflected discredit upon the Senate. Accordingly, you must repay the fair market value of all impermissible gifts not already repaid, and amend your Financial Disclosure Reports to include all reportable gifts. Finally, by this letter, you are hereby severely admonished.

Medicare Fraud Convictions

On April 28, 2017, Melgen was convicted on all 67 counts of Medicare fraud which had been brought against him.

Bribery, Fraud, & Extortion Indictments

On September 22, 2023, Menendez and the woman who had been his wife since 2020, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, were indicted in a Manhattan federal court. They were accused of having accepted massive sums of money and other high-priced items as compensation for the senator’s use of his political influence to enrich three New Jersey businessmen who were likewise charged in the indictment — former insurance agent Jose Uribe, real-estate developer Fred Daibes, and Wael Hana (an Egyptian American who was a longtime friend of Nadine Arslanian Menendez) — and to benefit the Egyptian government. Specifically, the charges against Mr. Menendez and his wife included: (a) conspiracy to commit bribery, (b) conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and (c) conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The charges against Mr. Menendez made him the first sitting senator in American history to be indicted on two unrelated criminal allegations. (As noted earlier in this profile, the senator’s prior indictment, filed in April 2015, had been for multiple counts of federal corruption.)

The 2023 indictment alleged that Senator Menendez had accepted bribes in the form of “cash, gold bars, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other items of value.” Indeed, federal agents had discovered many of those items in June 2022 while executing search warrants in the senator’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey home, including: (a) more than $480,000 in cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe”; (b) more than $70,000 in Nadine Menendez’s safe deposit box; (c) a $60,000+ Mercedes-Benz convertible that Mssrs. Hana and Uribe had given to Nadine Arslanian Menendez in exchange for the senator’s interference in state prosecutions of a Uribe associate and a Uribe relative; and (d) gold bars, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, which had been provided by Hana and Daibes.

The September 2023 indictment further claimed that:

  • Menendez had “provided sensitive U.S. Government information and [taken] other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt” — i.e., he had “improperly advised and pressured” a U.S. Agriculture Department official for the purpose of protecting a business monopoly by which Egypt permitted Hana to be the exclusive purveyor of halal meat to that country.
  • After Nadine Arslanian in 2018 had informed Hana that she was dating Mr. Menendez, she and Hana — “in the following months and years” — took pains to introduce a number of Egyptian intelligence and military officials to the senator “for the purpose of establishing and solidifying a corrupt agreement.” In executing that agreement, Hana, with assistance from Uribe and Daibes, “provided hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes” to the senator and his wife “in exchange for [Senator] Menendez’s acts and breaches of duty to benefit the Government of Egypt, Hana, and others, including with respect to foreign military sales and foreign military financing.”
  • Around March 2018, Mr. Menendez had met with Egyptian military officials “at a meeting arranged and attended by his then-girlfriend Nadine [Arslanian] Menendez and her friend Hana” at the senator’s office in Washington, D.C.  Notably, no professional staffers from Menendez’s Senate office or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were present at the meeting.
  • In May 2018, Senator Menendez — without informing any of his staff on Capitol Hill or the State Department — had sought “non-public information regarding the number and nationality of persons serving at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt” from the State Department — information that was considered “highly sensitive” because it had the potential to “pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public.” The senator then secretly texted that information to his then-girlfriend, Nadine Arslanian, who in turn forwarded it to Hana, who then forwarded it to an Egyptian government official.
  • In May 2018 as well, Nadine Arslanian had conveyed to Mr. Menendez an Egyptian official’s request to have the senator edit and draft a letter lobbying other U.S. senators to support U.S. aid to Egypt. As prosecutors put it, Mr. Menendez “secretly edited and ghost-wrote the request letter on behalf of Egypt seeking to convince other U.S. Senators to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt.” He then used his personal account to send Nadine Arslanian this ghost-written letter, which she in turn forwarded to Hana, who then relayed it to Egyptian officials.
  • In a March 2020 text message, Nadine Arslanian Menendez had told an Egyptian official — whom she referred to as “the general” — that “anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen.” A few days later, she arranged for Senator Menendez to meet with that same official to discuss negotiations over a dam on the Nile River in the region of Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. Eventually, Mr. Menendez wrote a letter to the secretaries of Treasury and State “to express my concern about the stalled negotiations.”
  • Senator Menendez had “promised to and did use his influence and power and breach his official duty to recommend that the President nominate an individual for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey who Menendez believed” he could influence to be lenient with Mr. Daibes in a federal prosecution which the latter was facing.

In October 2023, Menendez was slapped with an additional charge of conspiring to act as an agent of Egypt even while serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

On January 2, 2024, prosecutors charged that Menendez had also used his political influence to aid the government of Qatar. As CBS News reported on January 2, 2024:

“Sen. Bob Menendez … is facing allegations of accepting expensive gifts in exchange for favorable comments about Qatar, according to a second superseding indictment unsealed Tuesday [January 2]. The indictment does not charge Menendez with any additional crimes, but includes new allegations to support the charges in the first superseding indictment from October and the original indictment in September….

“The latest indictment broadens the allegations to include Qatar, accusing Menendez of assisting one of the businessmen, who was seeking a multimillion-dollar investment from a company with ties to the Qatari government, by making multiple public statements in support of the government.

“In June 2021, Menendez introduced the businessman, Fred Daibes, to an investor who was a member of the Qatari royal family and principal of an investment company, according to the indictment. The Qatari investor proceeded to negotiate a multimillion-dollar investment into a real estate project that Daibes was seeking financing for in New Jersey.

“While the Qatari company was considering investing, Menendez ‘made multiple public statements supporting the Government of Qatar’ and then provided the statements to Daibes so that the businessman could share them with the Qatari investor and a Qatari government official, the indictment says.  ‘You might want to send to them. I am just about to release,’ Menendez allegedly said in a message to Daibes on Aug. 20, 2021.

“The next month, the indictment says the senator and businessman attended a private event in New York that was hosted by the Qatari government. Days later, Daibes sent Menendez photographs of luxury watches that ranged in price from $9,990 to $23,990, asking Menendez, ‘How about one of these,’ the indictment said.

“After returning from a trip to Qatar in Egypt in October 2021, Menendez allegedly searched via the internet] ‘how much is one kilo of gold worth.’ Around the same time, Daibes was texting Menendez about a Senate resolution that was supportive of Qatar, according to prosecutors.

“Months later, as Daibes was set to meet with the Qatari investor in London, Menendez allegedly texted both of them: ‘Greetings. I understand my friend is going to visit with you on the 15th of the month. I hope that this will result in the favorable and mutually beneficial agreement that you have been both engaged in discussing.’

“The indictment indicated that Menendez and Daibes met privately with the Qataris in March 2022. Two months later, the Qataris signed a letter of intent to go into business with Daibes, who then gave Menendez at least one gold bar, prosecutors said.

“Menendez ‘continued to receive things of value’ from the Qataris, including tickets for relatives to the Formula One Grand Prix race held in Miami, according to the indictment.”

Immigration

According to the Washington Post, “Menendez has tried to position himself as the ‘Democratic Party’s conscience on immigration.’” Toward that end, Menendez in 2004 proposed legislation that would have allowed many illegal immigrants to apply for permanent guest-worker status or citizenship. That same year, he co-sponsored legislation with Senator Ted Kennedy that would have tightened restrictions on the manner in which law-enforcement officials could conduct immigration raids, but the bill never reached a vote.

In 2006 Menendez backed the broad “comprehensive immigration reform” plan that was never signed into law.

In 2008 he co-sponsored legislation that would have given illegal-immigrant high-school graduates a six-year window to become eligible for citizenship by either earning a college degree or serving in the military, but the bill did not make it out of committee.

Today Menendez favors a path-to-citizenship requiring illegal immigrants to pass a series of benchmarks such as paying a monetary fine and learning English.

In 2012, Menendez’s office was caught employing, as an unpaid intern, an illegal alien named Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, who had come to the U.S. from Peru on a tourist visa which had expired. In 2009, when Zavaleta was 15, he had sexually molested an 8-year-old boy at least eight times — transgressions for which he was sentenced to two years’ probation and was required to register as a sex offender. Zavaleta was charged with “aggravated sexual assault,” which, under the state criminal code, involves “an act of sexual penetration.”

Zavaleta’s case was not turned over to Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) until after he tried to apply for President Obama’s DACA program, which protected hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who had first come to the U.S. as minors, from deportation. When ICE was prepared to send Zavaleta back to Peru in October 2012, its New Jersey agents were told to stand down by the Obama officials running immigration in Washington, D.C., because Menendez was up for re-election in two weeks and the Democrats wanted to avoid an arrest that risked “garnering significant congressional and media interest.” Zavaleta was eventually arrested on December 6. Later that month, Menendez argued that the case “does speak volumes about why we need comprehensive immigration reform,” since “I can’t know who is here to pursue the American dream, versus who is here to do it damage, if I cannot get people to come forth out of the shadows.”

In early 2013, Menendez was one of the “Gang of Eight” U.S. senators (four Democrats and four Republicans) sponsoring Senate Bill 744, known as the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. This bill called for the provision of a path-to-citizenship for most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already residing in the United States; an expedited path-to-citizenship for illegals who first entered the U.S. as minors; a doubling of the number of future legal immigrants permitted to enter the U.S. from Mexico; and a continuance of the practice of “birthright citizenship,” whereby American citizenship is automatically granted to babies born in the United States regardless of the parents’ legal status.

The other Democrats who served on this panel with Menendez were Michael Bennet, Richard Durbin, and Charles Schumer. A Politico.com analysis noted that their proposal, if passed, “would transform the nation’s political landscape” by “pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that … would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

In March 2014, Menendez praised a Department of Homeland Security edict directing 21,000 U.S. border patrol officers to: (a) retreat and seek cover, rather than discharge their weapons, whenever illegal immigrants threw rocks at them; (b) keep their weapons holstered whenever drug smugglers were driving by or fleeing from the agents; and (c) avoid (on pain of penalty) making any effort to block the path of a vehicle being used in suspected wrongdoing.

At a January 21, 2021 video teleconference hosted by the American Business Immigration Coalition, Menendez warned that President Joe Biden’s pro-immigration amnesty would not be able to pass in Congress unless business leaders actively pressured politicians and the media. “Let me close by saying to my friends in the business community: We need you to give it everything that you’ve got,” said Menendez. “We need you to make it clear through your words and your actions — and your dollars — that you will not lend your support to politicians or platforms that stoke fear, spread xenophobia, and stymie prospects for reform.” He also urged business leaders to suppress any mention of the word “amnesty” in public debates about the bill, and to use the phrase “immigration reform” instead — so as not to erode public support for the measure.

On February 19, 2021, Menendez introduced The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 in the U.S. Senate. According to Fox News, the bill included provisions for:

  • an eight-year path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a much shorter time period than in previous proposals
  • the immediate granting of green cards to farmworkers, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries
  • expanding the controversial green card lottery from 55,000 per year to 80,000 per year
  • exempting children and spouses from visa cap numbers
  • giving green cards to dependents
  • “recapturing” unused visas from previous years to help clear backlogs
  • eliminating per-country visa caps
  • eliminating the “unlawful presence bars” — bans on legal re-entry to the U.S. for those who had previously been in the country unlawfully
  • establishing refugee processing centers in Central America.

“The bill [also] contains significantly less on border security than previous efforts on bipartisan immigration reform,” added Fox News, “including funding for technology to expedite screening and enhance the ability of officials to identify contraband.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had recently characterized the bill as a “massive proposal for blanket amnesty that would gut enforcement of American laws while creating huge new incentives for people to rush here illegally at the same time.”

Iran

In 2014-15, Menendez, in stark contrast to President Barack Obama, was a staunch supporter of additional sanctions against Iran as a means of pressuring its leaders to abandon their nuclear ambitions. When Obama suggested in January 2015 that Menendez and other likeminded Democrats may have adopted their pro-sanctions positions mainly in order to appease their donors, Menendez told the president that he took “personal offense” to that assertion. During a congressional hearing a few days later, Menendez said: “I have to be honest with you, the more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran. And it feeds to the Iranian narrative of victimization when they are the ones with original sin.”

Angry Exchange Regarding the Green New Deal

In February 2019 at a Capitol Hill subway station, Menendez had an angry exchange with Henry Rodgers, a Daily Caller reporter who asked the senator to comment on the Green New Deal resolution which recently had been introduced in Congress by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey. Menendez initially avoided the question and asked where Rodgers worked. After Rodgers said that he worked for the Daily Caller, Menendez said: “I won’t answer questions to the Daily Caller, period! You’re trash.” When the reporter then asked why Menendez felt that way, the senator shouted: “Don’t keep harassing me anymore or I’ll race to the Capitol Police.”

Supporting Extraordinary Measures to Bypass the Senate Filibuster Rule

In a June 23, 2021 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Senator Menendeaz said he was in favor of enacting a “democracy exception” to the filibuster rule in order to enable Democrats to pass the “For the People Act,” their radical “election-reform” bill, with a simple majority in the U.S. Senate. Asked if there might be common ground to be found with Republicans on the issue of election reform, Menendez said: “Well, look, I hope that we can reach common ground. Preserving the right to vote and the ability to cast that vote is the very essence of representative democracy. Yet, what we see across the country over 400 actions taken by Republican legislatures and introducing bills that restrict the right to vote, that makes it far more difficult to cast a vote, particularly in minority communities. That’s a telltale sign of where Republicans really are at. So it is my hope that if it wasn’t for The for People Act, that then tell us what you’re for at the end of the day to see what we can come together on common ground, at least to advance some of the democracy gains that we should be having in our society and make sure that everybody who is eligible to vote gets that right to vote and it gets to do it relatively in an easy fashion.”

“The reality is that we don’t have 60 votes in the United States Senate,” Menendez continued, “and for so long as the filibuster rule continues to be the rule in the history of the Senate, then we’re going to have a challenge on some of these big things. But I will say it takes two to tango. So, if I invite you to do things, whether it’s on infrastructure or voting rights and you basically say no, then it creates the impetus for some to consider what is necessary to be done to change the rules to permit maybe at least a democracy exception. Because this is the very core of our government and how we proceed, and it affects all other things.”

At that point, Tapper asked: “So you would support getting rid of the filibuster for an election reform bill exclusively, not just in general?” The senator replied: “In the absence of any visible demonstration by Republicans to come to the table and broaden the scope of how we make the right to vote is enhanced how do we get dark money out of our system, how do we ultimately have greater transparency in the funding of elections, I would consider that.”

Menendez & Fellow Democrats Rage at Saudi Oil Cut & Vow to Block Weapons Sales

When Saudi Arabia announced in early October 2022 that it had decided — against the Biden administration’s pleas — to cut its oil production by 2 million barrels per day, Menendez and other leading Democrats: (a) vowed to block all future U.S. weapons sales to the Saudis, and (b) exhorted the administration to “immediately freeze all aspects” of American cooperation with the the Saudis.

Menendez — who, as Senate Foreign Relations Chair, held veto power over foreign weapons sales — issued a statement on October 10 that said: “I will not green light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough.” “There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping … an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Menendez added. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Refusing to Designate Mexican Drug Cartels as “Terrorist Organizations”

On March 10, 2023, Republican Rep. Chip Roy (Texas) reintroduced the Drug Cartel Terrorist Designation Act. If passed, this bill would require the U.S. State Department to designate certain Mexican cartels — specifically, the Gulf cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, and Cartel del Noreste — as “foreign terrorist organizations.” When Menendez was asked if he would vote in favor of such legislation, he said: “We should save that for truly terrorist organizations in the world.” The senator added that he was more interested in “doing something that ultimately seeks to destroy the cartels than to just name them.”

Islamist Donations

Over the years, Menendez has received a few donations from high-ranking officials and/or board members of Islamist organizations. Specifically, from 2011-2018 he received a total of $7,510 in contributions from individuals affiliated with the Muslim Alliance in North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Voting Record

For an overview of Menendez’s voting record on an array of key issues, click here.

Additional Information

For additional information on Bob Menendez, click here.

Footnotes:


[1] Melgen is a native of the Dominican Republic who has lived in the U.S. since at least 1980. A longtime tax evader, Melgen incurred liens of $1.3 million before 2002, $6.2 million in 2011, and (as of February 2013) a still-outstanding $11.1 million between 2006 and 2009. Notwithstanding his tax debts, Melgen donated some $700,000 to Menendez and other Democratic candidates during the 2012 election cycle. (In fact, he was the leading donor to Menendez’s re-election campaign.)

In 2009 Melgen invested at least $51,500 in the Florida-based Gaseous Fuel Systems (GFS) Corporation, which manufactures and sells products to convert diesel-fuel fleets to natural gas; he then joined the company’s board of directors in early 2010. According to an Associated Press report: “At the same time, Menendez emerged as a principal supporter of a natural gas bill that would boost tax credits and grants to truck and heavy vehicle fleets that converted to alternative fuels. The bill stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, and after it was revived in 2012, the NAT GAS Act failed to win the needed 60 votes to pass.”

In addition to his work as an ophthalmologist, Melgen also manages a Florida company, Border Security Services LLC, which in 2011 purchased I.C.S.S.I., a port-security firm that had been providing X-ray screening at Dominican ports since 2002. (That port contract was worth an estimated $50 million per year, and the Dominican government had recently begun to express a desire to terminate the contract due to the high costs.) Columnist Michelle Malkin writes: “Menendez used a Senate hearing [in summer 2012] to lobby for enforcement of the contract Melgen’s company ha[d] with the Dominican government. Menendez also met with officials from the Obama State and Commerce departments on the matter, though he was careful not to mention Melgen by name. One of Menendez’s longtime senior legislative aides, Pedro Pablo Permuy, [was slated to] be in charge of operations …” For a detailed timeline of the Melgen-Menendez Dominican port security deal (and its historical context), click here.

In March 2013, it was revealed that in 2008 the federal government had accused Vitreo-Retinal Consultants, Melgen’s eye-care company, of over-billing Medicare by $8.9 million. In response to that charge, Melgen hired (at a cost of as much as $60,000) the powerful law and lobbying firm Arnold & Porter to lobby the Senate on his behalf vis a vis “issues related to Medicare reimbursement.”

[2] Senate rules require prior approval of such private jet travel and luxury lodging, and financial disclosure of such gifts after approval.

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