Category: Corruption

The Wrong ‘Yaneisi Fernandez’? Stupid Media Trick Fails to Clear Menendez

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Univision interviews wholesome non-prostitute Yaneisi Fernandez

Well, isn’t this special? “Fernandez” isn’t exactly a rare name in Latin America, and “Yaneisi” is more common that you might have suspected, so when a Univision TV crew barged in on a 21-year-old woman named Yaneisi Fernandez, who was horrified by the accusation of being a call girl who got paid to party down with an American politician — well, what part of “mistaken identity” is so hard for you to understand?

E-mails provided by tipster Peter Williams to the Daily Caller describe a Dominican woman, Yaneisi Fernandez, who was allegedly involved in the underage prostitution scandal now surrounding New Jersey senator Robert Menendez. Univision tracked down a woman by the name of Yaneisi Fernandez at her home in the Dominican Republic; she says she is not a prostitute and has never met Menendez. You can watch the segment, which aired in Spanish, here. The Daily Caller, however, claims the network interviewed the wrong Yaneisi Fernandez, noting that the e-mails in question “never mention whether Fernandez lives in the Dominican Republic” — some of the women mentioned claimed to live in Miami — and that their reporters found twelve separate American directory listings for women by the name of Yaneisi Fernandez.

Look, if I told you that circa 1978 I dated a freckle-faced girl named Peggy with C-cups who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, there would probably be enough women who fit the description that you’d never be able to find her. If I told you that I also dated her sister Kathy, that might narrow things down a bit, but I digress . . .

Beyond such hypothetical speculation, this “Yaneisi Fernandez” escapade reminds me of when Brian Ross of ABC News mistakenly identified a Colorado Tea Party activist named “James Holmes” as the Aurora theater massacre gunman of the same name.

Oops!

Evidently, the clever folks at Univision got the absurdly illogical idea that if they could find one young woman named “Yaneisi Fernandez” in the Dominican Republic who had not been paid to have sex with Robert Menendez, then this would prove that Robert Menendez never banged any hookers in the Dominican Republic. And this was instantly trumpeted in major media headlines as having proven just that:

Woman denies being a prostitute, meeting Menendez
— CNN

Woman denies knowing Menendez
— Politico

The effect of such headlines was to suggest that Menendez had been exonerated — the allegations were just a bunch of right-wing “smears,” as he said — and in all such situations, it is my habit to presume that the intent was the same as the effect. The liberal media very much want this ugly sex scandal to go away, and I’ve got a cynical hunch that the senator’s well-connected daughter Alicia Mendendez is helping coordinate the MSM communications pushback, so . . .

Hey, what’s this story about Alicia Menendez? And what’s this latest headline from the New York Times?

Port Deal Pushed by Menendez Could
Benefit Former Aide, Not Just a Major Donor

Why is the Menendez media pushback operation failing? Maybe it has something to with the fact that New Jersey is full of ambitious Democrats who might benefit from the senator’s downfall. And who would move up as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if Menendez were to get hounded out of office?

So there are Democrats with personal motives to take out Menendez, and maybe there are some Florida politicians in both parties who think they might benefit from exposing the connection between Dr. Salomon Melgen and certain eminent Republicans.

Damned complicated mess, this story. More complicated than trying to date two sisters at the same time. Hypothetically, that is.

 

100,000 Hookers vs. the Alleged Heterosexuality of Robert Menendez

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Svitlana Buchyk: Robert Menendez denies having sex with her, too.

A couple of days ago, I got an anonymous e-mail tip to the effect that the real scandal is that Robert Menendez likes sex with young boys. I ignored this tip, figuring that the tipster was a Democrat operative trying to trick me into discrediting myself by reporting a dubious rumour.

You have to watch out for that stuff when you’re covering a heavy story like HookerGate. Remember, during the Anthony Weiner scandal, there was someone — or perhaps several people — trying to obscure the guilty truth by creating fake “girls” who claimed to have been romantically involved with the accused congressman. That whole “Betty and Veronica” distraction was obviously a trick I call the Reverse Ratfuck: Defend the guilty politician by deceptions that undermine the credibility of the accuser.

Hey, just incidentally, did I mention that Neal Rauhauser sent a Twitter message to Anthony Weiner Monday? But I digress . . .

Careful to avoid the Reverse Ratfuck, then, I ignored the anonymous e-mail accusing Menendez of pederasty as probably being a trick, until I saw the pained earnestness with which the New Jersey Democrat denied having banged any hookers in the Dominican Republic:

DANA BASH: One last question. Can you just answer the allegation that has been out there that you…
SEN. MENENDEZ: The smears?
BASH: … that you were with prostitutes there?
MENENDEZ: The smears that right-wing blogs have been pushing since the election. And that is totally unsubstantiated. It’s amazing to me that anonymous, nameless, faceless individuals on a Web site can drive that type of story into the mainstream. But that’s what they’ve done successful.
Now, nobody can find them. No one ever met them. No one ever talked to them, but that’s where we’re at. So the bottom line is all of those smears are absolutely false and, you know, that’s the bottom line.

Let me translate that for you:

“How dare you acccuse me — a suspiciously divorced Democrat who hasn’t been plausibly linked to any woman in a post-divorce romance — of desiring contact with the hot moist nether regions of a young Latina in a country where prostitution is legal!”

That is to say, the denial seems a bit too adamant and comprehensive. Not only does Menendez deny having done the dirty deed with illegally young hookers, he denies doing any hookers at all, as if his only reason for visiting the Dominican Republic was to relax in the warm Caribbean sun with an iced rum cocktail or two.

Dana Bash somehow managed to keep from laughing out loud during that interview, but she must have been rolling her eyes at this denial. The country has a “reputation as a hub for sex tourism.” What McDonald’s is to cheeseburgers, the Dominican Republic is to hired poontang.

It would be very strange if anyone — especially a New Jersey Democrat — went to the Dominican Republic and didn’t bang a hooker.

The common-sense factor must be considered here. Let’s just take a look at the Daily Caller’s gallery of Svitlana Buchyk photos and apply the reliable Ace of Spades test: “Would you hit it?”

Are you kidding me? Elton John would hit that.

Anderson Cooper would hit that.

Liberace would hit that, and he’s been dead for 26 years. Continue reading 100,000 Hookers vs. the Alleged Heterosexuality of Robert Menendez →

Svitlana Buchyk: Mystery Woman in Menendez HookerGate Scandal

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Matthew Boyle of Breitbart.com just published a photo of a woman who reportedly “worked” for Dr. Salomon Melgen, the Palm Beach opthamologist at the center of the scandal surrounding embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). Melgen’s office was raided by the FBI last week, amid accusations that Menendez attended “wild sex parties” with prostitutes during trips to the Dominican Republic provided by Melgen.

The Russian-born woman, Svitlana Buchyk, figures prominently in the prostitution accusations against the scandal-plagued Menendez, who is in line to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Kathleen McGrory and Melissa Sanchez of the Miami Herald reported:

Public records show that a woman named Svitlana Buchyk got into a minor crash while driving a Chevrolet Impala on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables in 2010. The car belonged to Melgen’s wife. Buchyk gave Melgen’s North Palm Beach address as her own.
Buchyk spoke briefly with a Miami Herald reporter by telephone Thursday, saying she had worked for Melgen in the past.
But Buchyk wouldn’t answer questions on the type of work she did, and was eager to defend Melgen — particularly when asked about stories of Melgen’s alleged sexual liaisons with prostitutes.
“He is an amazing person,” she said. “He was always with his family. There is nothing else I can say.”
Buchyk added that many women would have liked to have spent time with her former employer.
“He treated me well,” she said. “He had money. He was very generous.”

The photo published by Boyle shows Buchyk in front of what appears to be Melgen’s private jet during a May trip to Hawaii, not long after a tipster using the name “Peter Williams” contacted an ABC News reporter with allegations about Menendez’s trips to the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean island nation where prostitution is legal and as many as 100,000 prostitutes reportedly ply their trade. In his e-mails, “Williams” described Buchyk as “one of the most regular participants in the activities the Doctor [Melgen] arranges for the Senator [Menendez],” and said the woman “has traveled with them in the jet, sailed with them in the yacht, and has repeatedly visited the Doctor’s house.”

Melgen has a history of spending big money on his mistresses, Boyle reports, noting a 2002 federal court case involving Yuddehiris Dorrejo, a woman on whom Melgen spent $700,000, allegedly in exchange for “an intimate romantic relationship” that began in 1998.

Melgen, who has contributed generously to Menendez’s political campaigns, reportedly owes $11.1 million in unpaid federal income taxes.

UPDATE: Andrew O’Shea at Viral Read has a selection of photos of Svitlana Buchyk, including bikini/lingerie shots.

Amazing, the quality of womanhood available to guys who can afford to cheat the IRS out of $11.1 million.

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HookerGate: What Did @AliciaMenendez Know, and When Did She Know It?

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“Alicia Menendez is a Senior Advisor to NDN and its sister organization, the New Policy Institute. . . . Ms. Menendez comes to NDN/NPI as a well-established television commentator and experienced organizer in important emerging communities. You can find her talking about national politics just about every week on the cable news networks, Fox and MSNBC. . . . She also spent time as a television segment producer and on-air contributor for RNN TV in New York, and was a primary surrogate on her father’s successful 2006 bid for the US Senate in New Jersey.”
— Simon Rosenberg, “Alicia Menendez Joins the NDN Team,” New Democrat Network, Jan. 13, 2010

“In NDN’s calculus, the long-term success of the Democratic Party will depend heavily on the party’s ability to ‘master the new media and technology tools that are changing the way we all communicate and advocate.'”
— Discover the Networks

Parlaying powerful family connections into a lucrative career in politics and media is not an unusual story in Washington, and it appears that the daughter of embattled Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has traveled that familiar path, as Adam Hose reports at Viral Read:

Alicia Menendez . . . graduated from Harvard College in 2005, with an honors degree in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality. . . . She is founder of dailygrito.com, has appeared on MSNBC Live, CNN International, BBC World and Fox News and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
Ms. Menendez is a self-proclaimed feminist and has addressed women’s issues in politics in many different ways. In a March 2008 piece she wrote . . . focused on then-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, after it was discovered he had been paying for the services of prostitutes. She seemingly excused his actions for biological, boys-will-be-boys reasons . . . Then during the 2012 presidential election (as well as her father’s own re-election campaign), in a piece for NBCLatino.com, she addressed “The GOP’s Lady Problems,” claiming that because Republicans desire to discuss women’s issues in terms of the economy, deficit and jobs, instead of contraception, abortion rights and equal pay, they were out of touch with women in general.

Read the whole thing. Alicia Menendez leveraged her father’s political connections into a career that includes being a HuffPo “star,” even while her father was leveraging his own connection to a Palm Beach campaign contributor into free flights to the Dominican Republic for (alleged) sex parties with young prostitutes.

Isn’t it therefore incumbent on Alicia Menendez to explain what she knew about her father’s involvement with Dr. Salomon Melgen, who is now the target of an FBI investigation? Certainly, other journalists are now demanding answers to these disturbing questions:

In an editorial Sunday, the Newark Star-Ledger said the scandal surrounding the senator raised “serious  doubts about his fitness to serve as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.” . . .
Menendez is facing a Senate ethics probe and an FBI investigation into a donor,  who is suspected of providing him with free trips on his private jet and  underage prostitutes during visits to the Dominican Republic, according to  reports from the media website The Daily Caller and a complaint filed with the  Justice Department by a watchdog group.

Does the Huffington Post employ Alice Menendez as a journalist, or is her “job” just a partisan patronage sinecure for the overprivileged daughter of a powerful (and possibly corrupt) Democrat? What are they really paying her for? Is it possible that Alicia Menendez is using her influential connections to help pressure her fellow “progressives” in the media to ignore her father’s sleazy scandal?

Oh, what a coincidence: Senator Menendez’s office has gotten one of the women to deny knowing the Senator!

So if Yaneisi Fernandez says she’s never met Menendez or worked as a prostitute, then obviously he must be innocent, right? I mean, when in doubt, you’ve got to take the word of alleged Dominican prostitutes. Because they’re as honest as New Jersey Democrats.

Alicia Menendez is on Twitter. Maybe you can ask her some questions.

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Dominican Prostitute in Menendez Scandal Says They Were ‘Very Mistreated’

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Here’s this morning’s Menendez headline stack at the Drudge Report:

I point this out because there were people in the comments of my post this morning (“HookerGate: Miami Herald Confirms Elements of Menendez Prostitute Story“) who were wondering if the mainstream media were going to ignore this story and let Menendez skate. And the answer to that question is, I don’t think they can, even if they wanted to.

Consider this latest report from David Martosko and Charles C. Johnson at the Daily Caller:

A Dominican prostitute’s firsthand account of sex parties allegedly attended by New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez refers specifically to another participant: Vinicio “Vinicito” Castillo Seman, the scion of a prominent Dominican political family who serves as a lawyer for his cousin, Dr. Salomon Melgen, in the Caribbean nation. . . .
At least one of the women allegedly involved has said she was younger than 18 when she first had sex with Sen. Menendez.
In her account, sent via email on April 21, 2012 to the liberal advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the prostitute identified “Vinicito” by name as a participant, along with Melgen and Menendez. . . .
“It was during some yacht outings that I realized I needed to get out of there,” the young prostitute wrote in one email included in that collection, “because these people are so important and they do whatever they want with whomever they want.”
“Vinicito was there, who goes to many of the doctor’s functions and invents things [to do] with the young girls, and then forces them to do the same things with the doctor’s friend. And he really liked it and wanted to take them to another place, but I don’t know where. They threatened those girls and told them to not talk, and that they couldn’t leave.” . . .
In an April 28 email to CREW about the sex parties, the same woman said that “we women are very mistreated,” especially “the younger ones between 16 and 18 years old.”

Go read the whole thing. Menendez denies banging hookers, underage or otherwise, during his Caribbean holidays, but Menendez also originally denied accepting free flights to the Dominican aboard his shady Palm Beach campaign contributor’s private jet — until the FBI started snooping around, and Menendez figured out the jig was up.

What you’re beginning to see now is the drip-drip-drip effect: Once the scandal got serious enough that the New York Times was forced to report on it, that served as a signal to other news organizations that this is a legitimate story, rather than (as many mainstream reporters had apparently wanted to believe) just some flimsy thing ginned up by Menendez’s right-wing enemies.

Guess what? There’s much, much more to come.

Remember that, on Oct. 31, I was able to name Menendez as the focus of the scandal even before the Daily Caller published its first article about the scandal. And what I’m hearing through the grapevine now is that there is so much related stuff — various interesting details about Senator Menendez’s divorce, for example — that the sources are doling out to other news organizations bits and pieces that Daily Caller and Breitbart.com don’t have time to report. There is an entire dossier on Menendez, in other words, and now that there’s blood in the water and lots of journalistic sharks circling the scandal-plagued senator, the contents of that file will be unloaded.

Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald describes the “mystery novel” aspects of the Menendez story and the shadowy tipster who broke it:

The investigation into his ties with Menendez began in August, after the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent an agent the complaint that “Peter Williams” first sent to CREW months before.
CREW, ABC News the FBI had trouble getting Williams to be forthcoming. He refused to meet with them or speak on the phone.
CREW’s executive director, Melanie Sloan, said Williams was also suspicious because the self-described American citizen and father of two daughters claimed to know about the illicit activity since 2008. But he only complained in an election year when control of the Senate was up for grabs.
At one point, on Sept. 12, FBI agent Regino Chavez emailed Williams and said “we have been able to confirm” most of the information he provided. But it’s not clear what that information was.
On Nov. 1, Chavez seemed annoyed that Williams had provided him no access to the alleged prostitutes yet two others gave an interview with the conservative Daily Caller website just before the election that Menendez won. Those prostitutes were not underage and neither claimed Menendez consorted with minors.
Williams suggested that he was not aware of those two prostitutes. They can’t be found any longer. Their former lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, has stopped returning press calls.
The email trail with the agent, sent anonymously to reporters late last month before Menendez was set to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ends in late December.

Hmmm. So the FBI agent Chavez was “able to confirm” the mysterious tipster’s information in September, and yet it was not until January that the FBI raided the Palm Beach offices of Menendez’s big donor Dr. Melgen. Could it be that powerful political figures at the Justice Department were less than eager to pursue this investigation?

Just askin’ questions. As Professor Jacobson says, I’m “all over the story like a U.S. Senator on a Dominican prostitute.” Expect more, soon.

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HookerGate: Miami Herald Confirms Elements of Menendez Prostitute Story

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The shadowy (and probably pseudonymous) tipster “Peter Williams” gave specific details about the prostitutes who were allegedly provided to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez in the Dominican Republic. Two Miami Herald reporters, Kathleen McGrory and Melissa Sanchez, traveled to Santo Domingo to check out the story and, while they were unable to locate the prostitutes, they were able to confirm certain details:

[S]hreds of evidence in Santo Domingo show that, at the very least, the women Williams described exist.
Take an apartment in Santo Domingo’s upscale Gazcue neighborhood that Williams said was used for sexual liaisons. In April emails to  a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Williams alleged that Dr. Salomon Melgen, a friend and major campaign donor to Menendez, rented a unit for a Brazilian prostitute named Maria and a Colombian prostitute named Geraldine.
The apartment exists. When reached by phone, the landlady said that two young women named Geraldine and Maria had indeed lived there last year, and said the nationalities matched.
However, the landlady, who declined to be named, did not believe the women to be prostitutes — she said she thought they were beautiful foreign exchange students — and had never heard of Menendez or Melgen visiting the apartment. But she complained that the women had nearly destroyed the unit, even leaving the wallpaper torn up when they abandoned the apartment last year.
“They behaved very badly,” she said. The apartment has since been rented to others and is now back on the market for $1,000 a month.

You can read the whole thing. The details confirmed by the two Miami Herald reporters are important because — as anyone with experience chasing this kind of story would tell you — if the story were totally bogus, basic facts like names and addresses wouldn’t check out.

A bogus story would have make-believe girls at non-existent addresses, but instead this story has the little details right. The fact that the women have now “disappeared,” as McGrory and Sanchez report, isn’t particularly surprising, nor is it surprising that the landlady (a) thought the hookers were “foreign exchange students” and (b) didn’t know the names of their alleged clients.

Locating the two hookers in the Dominican Republic may prove difficult for the simple reason that the country is crawling with hookers:

“Prostitution is everywhere here; on the beach, in the bars, in the clubs,” said Antonio Guzman, 36, a hustler who has worked the beach for 15 years and regularly connects tourists with prostitutes. “This place runs on it.” . . .
Long before explosive allegations emerged claiming Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and a political contributor flew to the country for wild parties with several prostitutes, the Dominican Republic had cemented its reputation as a hub for sex tourism. . . .
Studies suggest between 60,000 and 100,000 women work in the sex trade in the country, according to the Center for Integral Orientation and Investigation, a health and outreach organization based in the capital, Santo Domingo.

So this Caribbean island nation where Senator Menendez paid frequent visits is a sort of regional hooker-magnet. And exactly how many trips to the Dominican Republic did Senator Menendez make on the private plane of his Palm Beach campaign contributor? There seems to be some dispute about this, Matthew Boyle reports:

Flight records obtained by Breitbart News show Democratic Party donor Dr. Salomon Melgen’s private jet was in New Jersey near Sen. Bob Menendez’s home on April 8, 2012 — Easter Sunday last year. From there, it flew straight to the Dominican Republic.
Menendez and his staff have not answered when asked repeatedly whether the Senator was on that flight. They also have not provided any accounting as to where Menendez was on Easter Sunday, either.

Read the whole thing. This is highly interesting, because on Jan. 4, Menendez paid back Dr. Melgen $58,500 for three flights, but this (alleged) Easter weekend trip wasn’t one of those, and it was during the Easter weekend trip that one of the sex parties (allegedly) took place.

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Billion With a ‘B’: Did Menendez Provide Special Favors to HookerGate Donor?

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A sex scandal is quite often more than just a sex scandal, and the emerging story of the connection between embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and his shady Palm Beach patron, Dr. Salomon Melgen, appears to be developing as a complex scandal:

Sen. Bob Menendez used his influence to advocate for a Dominican Republic business deal that helped a longtime friend and donor whose South Florida office was raided by federal agents this week.
Menendez questioned Obama administration officials at a July hearing about what it was doing to help U.S. businesses that he felt were being unfairly treated by the government of the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries.
One company Menendez was apparently referring to: ICSSI, acquired the year before by Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach County eye doctor and friend. The firm was seeking to enforce a contract it had won to X-ray Dominican Republic port cargo, that could be worth $500 million to $1 billion over two decades.

Follow the money — if Melgen had a billion-dollar contract at stake, his “friendship” with Senator Menendez was obviously more than a mere social acquaintance, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it was illegal for Menendez to pressure the administration to help Melgen enforce his Dominican port security contract. But how and why does a Florida opthamologist become an international port-security mogul? The New York Times rather unsubtly raised that point Friday:

Two years ago, Dr. Melgen, despite an apparent lack of experience in border security issues, bought an ownership interest in a company that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security. . . .
The friendship between the two men goes back to the 1990s, when Mr. Menendez, who entered the House of Representatives in 1993, began regularly visiting the Dominican Republic. They spent holidays together, often in the Dominican Republic, where Dr. Melgen has a home in Casa de Campo, a gated oceanfront resort where houses cost as much as $20 million and which has been home to some of the country’s richest residents, like Oscar de la Renta. . . .
Also in 2010, Dr. Melgen moved to buy the ownership interest in ICSSI, a company based in the Caribbean that had been awarded a contract to provide extensive screening of cargo from ports in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government was refusing to honor that contract, after Miguel Cocco, then the Dominican customs director, had long said the deal was an exorbitant giveaway to the company.

Question: Would just any random investor be interested in a deal like this, or would ICSSI’s “long-dormant contract” be valuable only to someone with enough political “juice” to apply leverage against these Dominican officials?

Did Melgen’s carefully nutured relationship with Menendez therefore give him a special opportunity? The questions multiply and it’s often difficult in such situations to prove that this quid over here is connected to that quo over there by a pro, if you see what I’m saying.

Back during the Lewinsky scandal, remember, the president’s lawyer buddy Vernon Jordan made an extraordinary effort to help Monica get a job with New York-based Revlon (a firm headed by a Clinton donor) and then arranged for Monica to sign an affidavit stating that she couldn’t testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit because, well, she was moving from D.C. to New York for her new job at Revlon.

The blindingly obvious truth is that this was obstruction of justice and suborning of perjury as part of a corrupt effort to deprive Paula Jones of relevant testimony in her civil-rights lawsuit against Clinton, but actually proving the “pro” part of the quid pro quo — helping Monica get this job from a campaign contributor in exchange for having her sign this false affidavit denying a sexual relationship with her presidential boyfriend — was impossible, so long as everybody involved was willing to lie about it, as they most certainly were.

Or think about Watergate: If it hadn’t been for the White House tapes, Nixon might have gotten away with that cover-up, letting some minor figures take the fall for the “Plumbers” operation and using plausible deniability to conceal any direct presidential knowledge.

All of which is to say that turning HookerGate into enough of a scandal to take out a Democrat in heavily-Democratic New Jersey could be rather more difficult than it might seem. However, it doesn’t seem that Obama is willing to invest any political capital to protect Senator Menendez, as Neil Munro reports at the Daily Caller:

White House spokesman Jay Carney refused to defend Sen. Bob Menendez when he was quizzed by a reporter Thursday.
Does “the president have full faith and confidence in the senator?” asked a reporter during the midday White House press conference.
“I’ve seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” Carney said.
“He plays a significant role in immigration,” the reporter followed up.
“I don’t have anything for you on those reports,” Carney repeated.

Munro reminds us of yet another Menendez scandal:

In December, immigration agents arrested an intern who worked for Menendez’s staff. The Peruvian intern was an illegal immigrant and a convicted child molester, who worked in Menendez’s New Jersey office.
The Associated Press subsequently reported that federal immigration officials delayed any arrest of the man until after Menendez won re-election Nov. 6.
When asked [Thursday] if White House officials knew of agency’s decision to delay the arrest, Carney declined to answer. “I’ve not seen those reports. I don’t have anything for you on that,” he said.

Remember that the HookerGate story first broke on Halloween, six days before Election Day, but it seemed impossible at that time to get anyone to take the story seriously. I remember being frustrated with some of my Republican friends whose response was, “What difference does it make in New Jersey? Menendez is going to win no matter what. We need to concentrate on the presidential campaign.”

Republicans can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Couldn’t the spectacle of a Democrat senator whore-hopping in the Caribbean have value as a pushback against the ridiculous “war on women” narrative of the campaign? But when you raised that point, Republicans would then tell you, “Well, the liberal media will ignore it anyway” — defeatism, a de facto confession that the entire elaborate messaging apparatus of the Right is utterly useless in overcoming media bias.

No point in hindsight recriminations now, although it’s amusing to see David Graham at The Atlantic attempt to rationalize why the story was indeed ignored by the major media in November:

The story didn’t go anywhere, partly because it was so close to the election and Menendez was already a prohibitive favorite for reelection — he ended up beating his GOP challenger by nearly 20 percentage points — and partly because the Daily Caller has a reputation for wildly overpromising on scoops and then underdelivering on facts. (Remember the video that was going to end Obama’s campaign?) The article suggested there might be dirt, but nothing there that passed a smell test for serious news organizations.

Oh, dear God, where to begin? It took the National Enquirer to break the John Edwards scandal because the “mainstream” press was willing to ignore it, and even the Lewinsky scandal was originally spiked by Newsweek. We therefore have good precedent to expect that, when there is a really juicy scandal involving a Democrat, the story isn’t going to be broken by the mainstream outfits.

Ergo, one cannot dismiss such stories out of hand simply because they originate outside the journalistic mainstream. The fact that there is now an FBI investigation into — and a New York Times article about — the Menendez scandal requires that David Graham make some kind of excuse for having previously ignored a legitimate story, and all those digs at the Daily Caller are just that: Excuses.

You got scooped. You got beat. And the kid that beat you, Matthew Boyle, is still beating you on this story:

Dominican Flights Cost Menendez
Up to 18 Percent of Net Worth
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Menendez’s net worth is between $317,005 and $680,000. . . .
Since the reimbursement he made to his donor Dr. Salomon Melgen’s company totaled $58,500, Menendez spent a massive portion of his financial livelihood on the reimbursement for those two flights. . . .

Menendez Prostitution Scandal: Donor Melgen’s Political
Contributions Exploded After IRS Filed Tax Lien
Ophthalmologist and Democratic political donor Dr. Salomon Melgen may have tried to buy cover from the IRS for the $11.1 million he owes in back taxes from 2006 to present . . .
The donations continued to grow in size and quantity before Melgen began facing tax problems with the IRS in July 2002. The Free Beacon reports that the IRS filed a federal tax lien against Melgen for about $1.3 million then for unpaid taxes dating back to 1999 . . .

Matthew Boyle is still kicking ass and taking names, and The Hill’s Jordy Yager reports there’s blood in the water around Mendendez:

A cloud of scandalous allegations is rapidly growing over Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), putting Democratic leaders in a difficult position as the integrity of their immigration point man in the Senate falls under question at a critical time.
The bad news keeps coming: a Senate Ethics probe, allegations involving underage prostitutes, an FBI investigation of a key campaign donor, undisclosed flights on the donor’s private plane, and now, reports linking Menendez to an existing multi-million dollar contract he urged officials to enforce for the disgraced donor.

Depending on how strongly reporters follow up on the hooker angle, we may be just weeks away from Menendez’s resignation.

And what’s that you say, Jim Treacher? “Why is Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) following a very young-looking Dominican girl on Twitter?”

UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

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If You Don’t Think ‘Jailbait Hookers’ Is Headline News, You Don’t Know News

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When the major news networks ignored the FBI raid on the Miami doctor who bankrolled Sen. Robert Menendez’s trips to the Dominican Republic, I was frankly stunned. No matter how liberal your bias may be, the allegation that Menendez was banging underage hookers during his Caribbean expeditions is irresistible as news.

There is nothing in mere politics than can equal the power of a sex scandal to make people pay attention.

And dude: Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee? It’s almost as good as a sex scandal with a congressman named Weiner.

So, how did the Senator — who was all about empowering women and youth — like his hookers? Of course, he liked ’em young and fresh:

In a little-noticed email published online Wednesday by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a young Dominican woman wrote nine months ago that she slept with 59-year-old New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez at a series of sex parties organized by Dr. Salomon Melgen, a longtime Menendez campaign donor.
“That Senator also likes the youngest and newest girls,” the woman wrote on April 21, 2002, according to an English translation provided to The Daily Caller by a native Spanish speaker.

Could anything possibly be more newsworthy than that? How about the Senator’s (allegedly) exotic tastes for foreign women?

Another email string has been released naming some of the prostitutes involved with Dr. Melgen and Senator Menendez. Of the 4 prostitutes named, 2 were Dominican, 1 Russian, and another Colombian.

Yes, the names — Geraldine, La Honey, Yaneisy and Svetlana — conjure images of an international sexual smorgasbord assembled for the Senator’s prurient pleasure by his Miami patron. And you want to tell me that’s not newsworthy? Turn in your press credentials, clean out your desk and find another line of work, because you clearly have no aptitude for the news business.