Category: New Jersey

Media Embargo Slowly Crumbling on Jennifer McKenna Morbelli’s Death

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Jennifer McKenna Morelli with her future husband in 2008

Jennifer Morbelli died last Thursday at Shady Grove Hospital in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. after undergoing a gruesome third-term abortion ordeal at Dr. LeRoy Carhart’s Germantown Reproductive Health clinic. A 29-year-old married kindergarten teacher in the affluent Westchester County suburbs of New York, Morbelli had actually named her unborn daughter Madison Leigh, but reportedly decided to seek an abortion in her 33rd week of pregnancy after prenatal testing diagnosed her baby as suffering from a disorder that causes seizures.

Both Morbelli and her daughter will be recognized at a funeral mass Wednesday — coincidentally, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent — at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in New Rochelle.

Carhart has been called “likely the most prominent abortionist in America.” Carhart has been the plaintiff in two cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and was featured in a highly-praised documentary, After Tiller, about an abortionist who was assassinated in 2009.

Given these facts, ask yourself a question: How could any news editor look at the death of Jennifer Morbelli and say, “That”s not a story”?

This is not merely news, it’s got enough of a human-interest angle to deserve at least a two-hour network special or a magazine cover story.

Forget your opinion about the legal and political controversies involved and think about the basic journalistic news value of this story. Here is a profound human tragedy, a young woman who died in a heartbreaking circumstance which just happens to be a microcosm of a major national issue, and . . . that’s not a story? Turn in your press credentials, clean out your desk and find yourself another line of work.

This was why, last Friday, I called attention to the complete news blackout on the story: Jennifer Morbelli died in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., and yet neither the Washington Post nor the Baltimore Sun deemed it newsworthy? The illogic was glaring, and the Washington Post finally did a 350-word article inside the Metro section of Sunday’s paper. The media embargo crumbled further yesterday when the Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., reported on the death of the local kindergarten teacher. And now the Washington Post has followed up with coverage of Monday’s press conference by pro-life activists:

The Maryland Office of Health Care Quality is investigating the death of a woman who visited a controversial abortion clinic in Germantown before dying last week at a local hospital.
More than 150 demonstrators gathered near the clinic Monday to step up their efforts to draw national attention to the case, asserting that the clinic’s leader, LeRoy Carhart, was directly responsible for the woman’s death and that she had come to his office for a multi-day abortion procedure when she was 33 weeks pregnant.
“We will not rest until this clinic is shut down and the license of LeRoy Carhart is revoked. God let it be so,” the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, said at the demonstration.
The circumstances leading to the woman’s death remained unclear Monday. State and county officials confirmed that she had visited the abortion clinic and that she died Thursday morning at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, but they offered no details.
Antiabortion demonstrators seized upon the incident to try to sway public opinion about late-term procedures. Many of their specific claims about the case could not be immediately verified. . . .

You can read the whole thing, and I could criticize how the reporter, Dan Morse, handled the story, making “antiabortion demonstrators” (rather than LeRoy Carhart or Jennifer Morbelli) the central characters of the narrative and insinuating that their version of events was unreliable. (As I pointed out Monday night, “If it weren’t for pro-life activists who keep constant vigil at this facility, we might not even know about Jennifer Morbelli’s painful death.”) But I’m not criticizing Morse, at least not at length, because at this point I really don’t care how much pro-abortion spin or liberal bias goes into mainstream media coverage of the story, just so long as they actually cover the story.

In the same spirit, therefore, let us applaud Roseann Moring and Robby Korth of the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald for their coverage:

A New York woman’s death has put Bellevue abortion provider LeRoy Carhart back in the national spotlight.
Abortion opponents say a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher died Thursday after getting a late-term abortion at Carhart’s clinic in Germantown, Md.
Carhart did not return messages left on his cellphone Monday. A woman who answered the phone at his Bellevue clinic said he would not be available for comment.
Maryland authorities confirmed the woman’s death but said they still are investigating the cause. Montgomery County (Md.) Police and the Medical Examiner’s Office declined to say whether she had been at Carhart’s clinic.
So far, abortion opponents are the only ones who have publicly linked the death to Carhart’s clinic.
Carhart is one of the nation’s few doctors who perform late-term abortions. He had done so at Bellevue’s Abortion and Contraception Clinic until 2010, when the Nebraska Legislature banned abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation.
He then opened the Germantown Reproductive Health Services clinic about 30 miles north of Washington, D.C.
Carhart also considered opening a late-term abortion clinic in Council Bluffs.
In response, Iowa lawmakers proposed legislation aimed at keeping him out of the state. . . .

Read the whole thing and notice that, like the Washington Post‘s Dan Morse, the World-Herald reporters don’t name Jennifer Morbelli as the victim, and make clear that they are merely reporting the assertions made by “abortion opponents.” Heaven forbid that any mainstream reporter should actually do some actual journalism the way “just a blogger” Jill Stanek did on this story.

If you know anything about Jill Stanek (which, of course, no liberal reporter would) you know that she wouldn’t report something like this unless she was absolutely certain of the facts, and so this concern-troll attitude that Stanek’s reporting “could not be immediately verified” bespeaks the incompetence and sloth of reporters who can’t be bothered, at least, to contact Stanek as a source. (Hint: She’s on Twitter.)

However, I don’t want to complain too much about this, because I’m genuinely grateful for any mainstream media coverage of this story. In fact, if some left-wing feminist blogger like Amanda Marcotte or Elspeth Reeve decided to do a post condemning pro-life bloggers for their coverage of Jennifer Morbelli’s death, I would absolutely welcome it. Please, feel free to denounce me by name, call me a hateful misogynist or whatever, and I don’t care: Just stop ignoring the story.

There will be a funeral in New Rochelle tomorrow morning — Ash Wednesday — and I defy anyone to say that funeral isn’t legitimate news.

 

 

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Washington Post Reports Menendez Corruption, Downplays Jailbait Hookers

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Even when they can’t find a way to avoid covering a Democrat Party scandal, they strive valiantly to retain their precious moral superiority. Front-page headine in the Washington Post:

Sen. Menendez contacted top officials
in friend’s Medicare dispute

However, as Jeffrey Meyer points out at Newsbusters, the 43-paragraph front-page story ignores the sexual allegations against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), which are relegated to a Style section article by Manuel Roig-Franzia derogating the prostitution angle and those who originally broke the story:

After providing four paragraphs on page C4 outlining the prostitution scandal, the article then went into an 17 additional paragraphs on the layout and atmosphere of the resort community known as “Casa de Campo” . . .
Roig-Franzia vehemently tried to refute the prostitution allegations against Menendez by mentioning, “the allegations — made by an anonymous whistleblower and first publicized on a conservative Web site — have not been verified independently.” . . . Roig-Franzia seems intent on suggesting it’s near impossible for a hooker to slip by Casa de Campo’s crack security staff . . .

Notice how closely the WaPo‘s “Don’t Believe Right-Wing Blogs” meme echoes Menendez’s own narrative, described by Michelle Malkin:

In his latest statement on the matter Monday, Menendez repeated his blanket denials of any wrongdoing, recycled his attack on conservative media reporting the story and labeled accounts of the alleged island sex parties “smears.” . . .
While Melgen shelled out millions to Menendez and the Democratic Party over the years, he is a serial tax evader. The jet-setting doc incurred liens of $1.3 million before 2002, $6.2 million in 2011, and a still outstanding $11.1 million lien between 2006 and 2009. And the FBI and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — not a part of the “right-wing” blogosphere the last time I checked — are now sifting through boxes of documents they carted away during last week’s raid of Melgen’s offices as part of a Medicare fraud investigation.
The feds finally acted after a document shredding truck was spotted outside Melgen’s clinic. I think it’s safe to say a “right-wing blog” didn’t send it.

Mendendez’s dismissal of “smears” by “right-wing blogs,” and the WaPo’s contemptuous attitude toward “allegations . . . publicized on a conservative Web site” are essentially the same meme: Attack the credibility of Matthew Boyle, who broke the story at the Daily Caller.

Menendez’s motives for attacking Boyle are obvious, as are the mainstream media’s: If the WaPo were to acknowledge that Boyle was right about Menendez, this raises the question of why the WaPo (with its large staff of professional journalists) didn’t follow-up on that scoop.

Ironic Bonus Link: Video of Menendez Denouncing Prostitution.




 

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Is Senator Menendez Doomed?

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Short answer: Hell to the yes!

Two FBI sources have told The Daily Caller that the bureau’s inquiry into  Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is now based in New Jersey, not  Miami. One added that pressure is mounting from the highest levels of the  Justice Department to pursue the investigation.
The change of focus away from the bureau’s Miami field office indicates that  the government is focused primarily on Sen. Menendez — and not on his longtime  donor Dr. Salomon Melgen, as political observers have speculated.
Menendez is embroiled in a scandal sparked by allegations that he slept with  underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

(Hat-tip: Viral Read.) There are rumors that powerful Democrats are now working to hasten the downfall of Menendez. Why do you think mainstream reporters are getting the greenlight for stories like this one by Shane Goldmacher of National Journal?

When Robert Menendez arrived in the U.S. Senate in 2006, he was a relative pauper in a chamber often called a millionaires’ club. The New Jersey Democrat ranked 97th out of 100 senators in terms of his personal wealth, according to financial records filed that year and compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
So Menendez’s decision last month to use his personal funds to reimburse a prominent political contributor $58,500 for two flights to the Dominican Republic came at a major cost. The repayment amounts to between 32 percent and 87 percent of the assets Menendez reported holding in bank accounts and stock, according to his latest financial-disclosure form, which was filed last year.
Menendez repaid Florida eye doctor and political donor Salomon Melgen only after his free flights aboard Melgen’s plane became public and the subject of a Senate ethics complaint.

Attempts by certain liberal journalists (e.g., Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post) to minimize the seriousness of this scandal will prove ineffectual, because if Senator Menendez tries to hang on, it might inspire greater scrutiny to other politicians connected to Dr. Melgen, and those other politicians don’t need that scrutiny.

Say hello to the underside of the Democrat bus, Senator Menendez.




 

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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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