Indicted Menendez draws from Trump’s playbook

NJ Democrat vows to push back against new legal entanglements

For the second time in a decade, Sen. Bob Menendez was indicted on Friday morning. Alongside his wife and three New Jersey businessmen, the state’s senior senator was accused of being part of a bribery scheme with payoffs ranging from cash and cars to no-show jobs and literal gold bars.

But unlike during his first indictment in 2015, when the party rallied behind him and shared its support, Menendez seems to be on the outside looking in as Democrats, including Gov. Phil Murphy and several members of the state’s congressional delegation, call for his resignation.

Still, Menendez has vowed to stand his ground – emulating a certain former president in a rival political party – even as onetime allies and foes alike pressure him to leave office.

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said that this time around, the charges against Menendez are more extreme and more tangible.

Inside

Sen. Bob Menendez has vowed to stand his ground amid new charges, drawing a comparison to the former president who is facing multiple indictments.

Booker calls on Menendez to resign.

“This is in another league, even by Bob Menendez standards,” he said. “This is not a plane trip that you didn’t put on a public disclosure form that’s hard for the public to wrap their head around. Everybody can see the pictures for themselves of the jackets stuffed with cash and the gold bars.”

Rasmussen said he doesn’t expect there to be “much of an appetite to rally around him.”

Republicans call for Menendez to resign

But it’s not just Democrats who want to see Menendez out. Alexandra Wilkes, a spokesperson for the state’s Republican Party, issued a statement that acknowledged Menendez’s “presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial” but said it is “clear that his decade-long legal woes have become an embarrassing distraction.”

“For the good of the people of this state, who deserve full and devoted representation, we call on Senator Robert Menendez to resign,” Wilkes said.

Similarly, Republicans on the state level appealed to their Democratic counterparts to, as Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio put it, “protect the interests of all Americans and New Jerseyans from this corrupt politician.” Or, in the words of the Republican ticket in District 38, Micheline Attieh, Gail Horton and Barry Wilkes, Democrats should “immediately disavow this despicable behavior.”

“This will be a real litmus test for New Jersey’s Democrat leaders. These are serious charges, and it’s not the first time the senator has been accused of criminal activity,” DiMaio said. “It’s time for him to go and for Democrats to do the right thing.”

Jeanette Hoffman, a Republican political consultant, said about Menendez, “This is such an outrageous situation. I’m not surprised he’s not resigning, given his personality. The accusations in the indictment are just outrageous, and to think that he could serve the people in the United States Senate is ridiculous.”

The shadow of Trump

The response is a far cry from what has played out on the other side of the aisle as a certain prominent Republican faces charges ranging from conspiring to defraud the government to trying to overturn election results in several states, yet he still sits securely atop the leader board for the party’s presidential nomination.

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in three states as well as Washington, D.C., and is expected to face a trial before next year’s presidential election. He is still leading in every poll for the Republican nomination in that race. Only a few notable Republicans have even been willing to speak out against him, one being former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who will square off against five other candidates on Wednesday night in the second debate.

“Anybody can run. They [Trump and Menendez] are both going to run,” Hoffman said. “I don’t doubt that both of them are going to run for office.”

She went on to say that “while Trump’s indictments haven’t hurt him during the GOP primary, general election voters would likely have a different perspective of the former president’s legal issues.”

Rasmussen sees this as further proof that everyone has the “right to expect more from all of our elected officials.”

“Ultimately, it’s up to us to expect more of our elected officials, to say that we’re not going to tolerate corruption of either partisan stripe of any variety, whether it’s subverting an election or personal enrichment,” he said. “At the end of the day, both parties should hold all candidates to the same standards … I think we need to have a higher standard and a higher set of expectations, no matter who it is that we’re talking about.”

Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: editor@patersonpress.com