That time Menendez blocked stronger foreign influence peddling rules

Good times, my friends. Good times…

Now that Bob Menendez has become the flavor of the week regarding alleged governmental corruption, even the mainstream media is taking him to task. This proves once again that most of them are willing to talk about literally anything but Biden Inc. and Joe and Hunter’s various cash schemes, so it appears that Menendez has to go under the bus. Yesterday, even NBC News decided to do a bit of a deep dive into the New Jersey senator’s past and came up with an interesting tidbit that may have provided some foreshadowing of the future. In 2020, a bill was introduced that would have strengthened FARA and more tightly controlled the possibility of foreign influence peddling and corruption. The bill had bipartisan support and appeared to be ready to move to the floor for a vote by unanimous consent. But one person bravely stood up and blocked it. And yes… that person was Senator Bob Menendez.

Sen. Robert Menendez, charged last week with secretly aiding the Egyptian government in exchange for bribes, singlehandedly blocked passage of bipartisan legislation in 2020 that would have strengthened the law regulating foreign influence and lobbying in Washington, Senate records show.

The proposed Foreign Agents Disclosure and Registration Enhancement Act grew out of widespread concerns that the current law regulating foreign lobbying had seldom been enforced, and that foreign influence campaigns had successfully infiltrated American politics. Strengthening the law had drawn support from Democrats and Republicans on key committees.

In December 2020, after a Republican senator asked for unanimous consent to bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote, Menendez stood and objected.

That was three years ago and FARA still has not received a single update. So what reason did Menendez give for opposing the bill? He said that it hadn’t been “thought through enough” and that the Senate needed to “take a step back and consider it further.” Yet, while there has been plenty of debate regarding FARA in the media, there has been no progress made in Congress in terms of strengthening those guardrails.

Perhaps Menendez was sending up smoke signals in 2020. Keep in mind that it had only been three years earlier in 2017 when he was indicted for the first time on charges of foreign corruption. So a bill designed to crack down on foreign corruption was blocked by the only Senator to have been indicted on charges of foreign corruption. But I’m sure that was just a massive coincidence that we shouldn’t make too much out of.

And now he’s been indicted again. We’re close to the point where almost all of the Democrats in the Senate have called on him to resign, but he’s sticking to his guns and maintaining that this is all a big misunderstanding so he’s “not going anywhere.” Meanwhile, the details that have been revealed thus far make Menendez appear almost cartoonish. The guy literally had stacks of cash totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars (with DNA on the envelopes!) stuffed into the pockets of his clothing. He had gold doubloons (okay… bars) lying around.

We’re being expected to believe that the money was all just funds that he had slowly withdrawn from his savings account over the years, perhaps as a way to deter moths in his closets. And the gold bars? They were “gifts.” But as I already mentioned, there was DNA from other people on the envelopes full of cash and all of the gold bars have serial numbers on them that can be traced.

Yes, everyone is entitled to their day in court if they claim innocence, and that applies to Bob Menendez too. But it feels as if we’re being asked to swallow a significant load of malarkey here, doesn’t it? It’s just a good thing that those FARA laws weren’t strengthened back in 2020. Bob Menendez shall surely be recalled as a true American hero when all of this is said and done.