Menendez has set a new low for blatant corruption in the US | New York Post

Menendez has set a new low for blatant corruption in the US | New York Post
"The bribery trial of senior New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has it all.
Menendez is facing charges that he sold his US Senate office to a Palm Beach, Fla., eye doctor, his co-defendant Salomon Melgen, for bribes in the form of private jets stocked with Menendez’s favorite beverages, a private villa at one of the lushest resorts in the Caribbean, and a Paris hotel suite for which Melgen spent 650,000 American Express points.
...That relationship allowed Menendez to enjoy a lifestyle far beyond his legitimate income of $174,000.
It was a life of luxury funded by one of the largest Medicare frauds in history, a $105 million scheme for which Melgen has already been convicted on 67 counts of fraud in a separate federal trial in Florida.
In return, Menendez allegedly got Melgen visas for his girlfriends, pressured the State Department to deliver a Dominican port-security contract and pressed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to approve the massive Medicare overbilling scheme that kept the good times rolling.

• ...Sometimes a friend gives a senator access to the private jet. 
• And a friend lets a senator use a luxury resort villa and gives the senator hundreds of thousands of American Express points. 
• And what senator wouldn’t try to get his friend’s many supermodel girlfriends into the country? 
• Or steer his friend — an eye doctor with no security background — a massive port-security contract? 
• Or try to get him off the hook for the Medicare fraud that keeps both of them in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed?

‘The case against Menendez as a legal matter doesn’t look close, it looks overwhelming.’ - Ari Melber..."