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Menendez unlikely to get Adams-style legal lifeline

By: Charles Stile
Political Stile
USA Today Network

..... A discussion on the popular political podcast "Left, Right & Center" last week [02/20/2025] underscored the hypocrisy of the U.S. Justice Department;s decisions to pull the plug on New York City Mayor Eric Adams' federal corruption case.
..... The two guests - a veteran Democratic strategist and a Republican operative and former Justice Department official who served in Trump's first term - agreed that the department advanced a quid pro quo travesty.
..... And both enlisted New Jersey's former Senator Bob Menendez and his federal trial to illustrate their point.
..... the Democratic strategist, Mo Elleithee, who is executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service, framed it this way: Imagine, for a moment, if former President Joe Biden and the Department of Justice had offered to pull the plug on Menendez's case in exchange for his using his bully pulpit on the flour of the Senate, boosting Biden's image in public while carrying out his agenda in private.
....."What if the Biden administration had said: We are going to drop this. Not if you give a speech on the floor talking how Joe Biden is the only guy who can be elected, but - Senator Menendez, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - you know we [can] drop this because you are instrumental in pushing the Biden foreign policy agenda in Ukraine?" Ellethee said. "the right would have lost their minds."
..... Trump's promised shake-up of the system is starting to look like a mob-style shakedown.
..... Under the guise of a formal legal filing, the Justice Department's second-in-command, Emil Bove III, argued that the accusations that Adams took free luxury travel and illicit campaign contributions from Turkish officials in exchange for a premature occupancy permit for the Turkish consulate building has impeded Adams' ability to help Trump carry out his dragnet of illegal immigrations in New York.
..... Bove also argued - apparently without irony - that the indictment hampered Adams' ability to run for reelection later this spring. [2025] The suggestion: The case was designed to mortally wound him politically just as he seeks another term. It was politically motivated.
..... Can you imagine if that absurd election-season reasoning was applied here in New Jersey? Half the corruption cases over the past decade would have been thrown out, and a fair number of the implicated officials might still hold elected office today.
..... But here is the mob-goon part of the New Trump Order at Justice Prosecutors want to reserve the right to bring back the charges against Adams at a later date. In other words, if Adams doesn't play ball and help out with the dragnet, they could drag him back to court.
..... "We should be really scared about a world in which a president threatens criminal prosecution against elected officials unless he does political favors for them," Sarah Isgur, the former Trump official, said on the podcast.
..... Another colossal irony here: Trump whose reelection was fueled by complaining of the "weaponization: of the Justice Department under the direction of a meddling Biden, has turned the department into his own weapon to further his own political agenda.
..... "I mean, if you voted for Donald Trump in part because you believed he would not weaponized the justice system, they have completely proven themselves to be liars on that," Elliethee said.

Menendez quest for a pardon probably won't go anywhere

..... But the Adams case also underscores how unlikely it is that Trump will come to Menendez's rescue with a pardon.
..... While Adams had been cozying up to Trump at sunny Mar-a-Lago, Menendez auditioned for a pardon in front of a chilly Manhattan courthouse last month, [01/2025] minutes after being sentenced to prison for 11 years for selling out his Senate office for cash and gold bars as a behind-the-scenes agent for Egypt and for trying to stop two criminal investigation. Menendez is appealing the conviction.
..... Adams has something of value to offer Trump: his help with the president's mass deportation plans, even with the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head.
..... What does Menendez ofter Trump? What does he bring to the table? Maybe some criticism form Trump's friends at Fox news, his chief hiring pool.
..... Certainly, Trump has express some sympathy with Menendez's plight before, viewing him as a fellow victim of an overzealous prosecution. (In fact, Menendez's lawyer sought unsuccessfully to get his case dismissed by claiming the senator was a victim of just that,)
..... And Menendez's case emerged on the Trump's Justice Department's radar during the Adams firestorm. After Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York refused to comply with Bove's demand to drop the Adams case, Bove fired off a tart reply to her.
..... In the letter, Bowe referred to a controversy over a batch of trail exhibits that the Menendez jury was not suppose to see during deliberations. Menemdez's lawyers cited the prosecutor's mishandling of the files as gorunds for tossing out the conviciton, but U.S. Distirct Judge Sidney H. stein rejected the move.
..... "Your reference to the schedule underlying the prosecution of Sean tor Robert Menendez is not in any way persuasive in light of the evidence-handling issues that arose in connection with that trial," he wort. "If anything, that experience counsels in favor of more caution in these matters, not less.
..... In this matter, though, Menendez is cited as rhetorical advantage in an argument. Trump will expect palpable results for a Mennedez pardon pro quo.

Could Menendez help with Gaza?

..... But here is one possibility: If Trump is serious about turning Gaza into the "Rivera of the Middle East," he'll need help from Egyptian officials in an agreement to accept potentially hundreds f thousands of Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
..... Perhaps Trump could pardon Memendez and make him a special envoy to Egypt, where he can reunited with those officials he once wined and dined and helped with the release of hundreds of millions in military aid. He knows some of them on a first-name basis.
..... It sounds ridiculous. Trump's grandiose Gaza fever dream, an ethnic cleansing on a grand scale, is absurd and cruel. It's hard to believe that this was nothing more than a Trump stir-the-news-cycle soundbite. But there are no more rules or norms of justice as we once knew it.
..... Anything can happen.

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