Menendez on cash hoard: Batista made me do it, or something

Come on, man. Faced with the undeniably crooked optics of having nearly a half-million dollars in cash and gold bars stuffed into jackets and other hiding places around his house, Robert Menendez had to come up with some sort of explanation that didn’t involve payoffs and influence-peddling. And the best Gold Bar Bob could come up with is … Fulgencio Batista?

Utterly shameless, and altogether hilarious. If the Babylon Bee had written it, no one would have bought it even as satire:

MENENDEZ: “For 30 years I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash…because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba!” pic.twitter.com/7vMQneevEA

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 25, 2023

In case you’re wondering, Robert Menendez was born in 1954. In New York City. His family had indeed emigrated there the year before from Cuba, six years or so before Fidel Castro came to power. There’s nothing on the record that I could find that indicated that the Menendez family fled Cuba on the basis of persecution, although it’s certainly possible. (Florida has a significant population of Batista refugees and their descendants, a complication often overlooked by politicians seeking to woo Cuban-Americans.) Batista could have confiscated their property too, although that was a move more associated with Castro and the communists — but again, the Menendezes had been in the US for several years when Castro came to power.

But even if they did have their property confiscated by Batista or Castro, need we point out that the obvious — that the US ain’t Cuba? Menendez has lived in the US his entire life, which at last count runs 69 years. In that time, has Menendez ever seen mass confiscation of cash from bank accounts by any US administration? Answer: nope. And who would keep gold bars around the house for “emergencies,” for that matter?

The risk of confiscation is actually much higher when carrying large amounts of cash, thanks to the war on drugs and the imposition of aggressive seizure rules. And if Menendez doesn’t like that, he’s been in the nearly unique position of being able to do something about it since 1993 — being a member of Congress. Has he even ever addressed that issue?

This is nothing more than an attempt to paint himself as a victim rather than a perpetrator. Normally Democrats do pretty well with that strategy, but this claim is so obviously absurd that it will likely backfire even further on Menendez, politically and otherwise. If Menendez tries that in court, prosecutors will likely ready their forensic accountants and force Menendez to account for every single dollar of that cash through legitimate transactions, and not just personal deposits and withdrawals. I’d be surprised if the Department of Justice hasn’t already conducted those audits, in fact.

Menendez is descending into farce. Expect more Democrats to tell him to hit the road tout suite, but don’t expect Senator Victim to listen quite yet. And that may be all for the better, as we can hopefully get a little more comic mileage out of Menendez yet.