Sitting Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) will not face retrial after the Justice Department decided to drop all remaining criminal charges against him.
Menendez faced more than one dozen criminal counts in his first trial last year, which ended in a hung jury. The presiding federal district judge, William Walls, dismissed seven counts last week.
Justice Department seeks dismissal of Menendez case – POLITICO
The Justice Department will not pursue its case against Sen. Bob Menendez and has filed a motion seeking the dismissal of the indictment against the New Jersey Democrat.
The decision, revealed in a court filing Wednesday, comes a week after a federal judge acquitted Menendez and co-defendant Salomon Melgen on seven of the 18 counts on which they were tried last year and two weeks after the government announced its intent to retry the duo after a jury deadlocked in November.
My Take
Could there have been political considerations behind the decision to drop charges? Menendez was facing reelection this fall in a safe seat in a dark blue state. Hillary Clinton carried New Jersey by 13 points over Trump in 2016, and the state just elected an Obama-style progressive, Phil Murphy, as Governor in an easy victory over the Republican former lieutenant governor. As such, whomever the Democrats nominated would have been a strong favorite to win.
In the current world of Democratic politics, a Bob Menendez somewhat hawkish on Israel (he was a strong critic of Obama’s Iran deal) would actually now be viewable as a moderate.
Had Menendez been convicted and removed from the ballot, he likely would have been replaced by a strong, Bernie Sanders-style progressive who would represent a far stronger critic of the Trump Administration.
While the decision to drop charges may be defensible in light of the hung jury in the first trial (with all but two jurors voting to acquit), it is also likely that the hung jury is providing the cover for a political decision to keep a relative ally, a friendly pro-Israel Democrat, in the Senate and away from a Kamala Harris-style replacement.
Knowing virtually nothing about the charges against Menendez or the history of the case, I believe you raise a good point as we are in an election year where far-more-than-usual Republicans are retiring from politics rather than risk losing re-election.
Whether they are being pushed out by Trump and his lackeys in DC or whether they are hearing from their constituents that the anger against the GOP that existed in 2016 has not abated (perhaps grown) with the unwillingness of Congress to effect meaningful change (or curbs on Trump’s excesses), makes no difference. We are looking at a Republican party that is more and more becoming a rubber-stamp for the Alt-Right noisemakers with no spine or backbone to stand up for the people that elected them and a WH that values loyalty to the king over loyalty to country or to the people Congress and our law-enforcement institutions are supposed to represent and serve.
I fear Dark Days are ahead, and things will continue to get worse until we return to our founding Christian principles of small, representative government and reject the cultural, spiritual, and sexual Atheist and Muslim influences that have triggered and encouraged the moral, spiritual and ethical rot in our culture and our country.