The jury in the federal corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and two of his business associates, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, found Menendez guilty on all charges after a grueling nine-week complex trial in Manhattan. . . .
Jurors deliberated for three days. . . .
In his five-hour closing argument on Tuesday, federal prosecutor Paul Monteleoni urged jurors to hold the New Jersey Democrat accountable for his alleged misconduct.
“This is a big case,” Monteleoni said. “But it all boils down to a classic case of corruption on a massive scale.”
During the trial, prosecutors used cited emails and text messages from Menendez – as well as FBI testimony – to present evidence they argued shows the senator accepted extravagant gifts from foreign governments. The gifts totaled more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed throughout Menendez’s New Jersey home.
Menendez was charged by federal prosecutors with 18 counts since he pleaded innocent last year, all relating to a multiyear alleged bribery scheme involving the Egypt and Qatar governments.
In March, an 18-page indictment was wrapped into Menendez’s existing charges already against him and his co-defendants — including his wife, Nadine — for allegedly acting as a foreign agent and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to benefit the Egyptian government through his power and influence as a senator.
New Jersey voters really know how to pick ’em, eh?
The man is stacking up W’s like nobody’s business. First, he wins the early debate that Team Biden demanded, then sits back and watches for two weeks while Democrats tear their party apart in an ultimately doomed effort to kick Sleepy Joe off the ticket. Then on Saturday he survives an assassination attempt, and by Monday, the situation is so dire for Democrats that MSNBC decides it’s not safe to let “Morning Joe” on the airwaves. Next, a poll comes out showing Trump leading every single swing state (and this was a poll taken before the assassination attempt), and right on the heels of that, the judge in the Mar-a-Lago documents case throws it out on constitutional grounds. So then he picks J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate, and the Republican National Convention starts off like an early victory celebration.
Have I left out any of Trump’s recent wins? Probably, but they’ve been piling up so fast I couldn’t keep track. And yeah, yeah, “don’t get cocky,” but the past couple of weeks have been such a non-stop streak of #winning that I’m starting to think maybe Democrats won’t even try to cheat their way to victory in November, because this thing is slipping outside the margin of fake mail-in ballots. I mean, Trump +7 in Arizona? All the fraud in Maricopa County can’t close that gap.
We’re still 16 weeks away from Election Day, and a lot could happen between now and then, but right now Trump’s got the momentum, and I refuse to let myself be bummed out by a few hand-wringing worry-warts.
I don’t know why, but I’ve always been partial to gals in denim or overalls. This one is courtesy of Rule 5 Texan on X. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I say, every time there’s a shooting, bombing, some other incident where people on social media start rushing to place blame, before any definite information is available. In my first update Saturday, at 6:55 p.m. ET, I said: “We still know nothing about what actually happened, and I urge everyone to avoid promoting unsubstantiated speculation.” Twenty minutes later, I added:
Don’t jump to conclusions. To call it “an apparent assassination attempt” is fine, but appearances can be deceiving. Until we have more definite information, we don’t know what happened, and should avoid pretending as if we do know. Patience!
Nothing is gained by excessive haste. Probably my attitude reflects the fact that I spent more than two decades in print journalism. Unlike TV, print journalists don’t have to “go live” and then keep talking to fill the airtime during a breaking news event, so we have can afford to take time to make sure we only publish facts that are fully confirmed.
So, we now know that this was an attempted assassination, and we know that the shooter was 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks but — this is very important — so far we don’t know his motive. Yes, obviously, the gunman wished to kill Trump, but as to why he wanted to kill Trump, I have to insist that we still don’t know. It would seem to be the simplest common-sense deduction to say that the would-be assassin’s motive was political, but does the name John Hinckley ring a bell?
In 1981, he tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan: “Hinckley was reportedly seeking fame to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had a fixation after watching her in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver.”
That’s not a political motive. That’s just plain crazy. And it is too early to rule out the possibility that Thomas Matthew Crooks was just plain crazy.
Classmate of the 20 year old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, says “he was bullied almost every day”. pic.twitter.com/4m3tLwJtzT
— Sabrina Smolders ?? (@SabrinaSmolders) July 14, 2024
Think back to the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. Liberals tried to blame Republicans and the Tea Party — especially Sarah Palin — for Jared Loughner’s murderous shooting spree in Tucson. But the truth of his motive was something much different:
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. By the time he latched onto the conspiracy-theory film, Loughner was already a very troubled young man. . . .
Go read the entirety of my 2011 American Spectator column, in case you’ve forgotten about that. As common-sense as it must have seemed to liberals — a Democratic congresswoman targeted for assassination, and therefore, the gunman must be a right-winger — the truth was, Jared Loughner was just plain crazy and, insofar as there was a political motive for his shooting spree, it was much more clearly left-wing.
Given my experience in debunking false narratives in such situations, readers will understand my reluctance to assume that what motivated Thomas Matthew Crooks to target Trump was the over-the-top rhetoric of Trump’s political opponents. That may yet prove to be the case — it’s certainly what Occam’s Razor would suggest — but so far we can’t say so for certain. Nevertheless, I found myself nodding in agreement with Austin Ruse’s column today at Chronicles:
Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts “fight, fight, fight.” Donald Trump is a legend.
As the Secret Service covered him with their bodies, even putting their hands protectively over his head, as they helped him to the car, the crowd could be seen turning to the media in the back and giving them the finger. They knew. They knew who did this. The left did this. The Democrats did this. The gutter press did this. The #NeverTrumpers did this.
What did they think would happen after months and even years yelling at the top of their lungs that Trump is Hitler, that Trump will be a dictator, that Trump is an “existential threat to our democracy?” Violence was inevitable.
Just a week ago, Biden said Trump needed to be put in the “bullseye.” In 2022, he said Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the “soul of our country.”
Last November, The Washington Post ran a column that said “every conceivable measure” must be taken to stop the “end of our democracy.” It said, “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything at him—pots, pans, candlesticks …” It said the next Trump administration will be filled “with Hitler’s gauleiters.” What did they think would happen?
Go to the NeverTrump Bulwark website founded by Bill Kristol and see they are nearly constant in their shrill cries that Trump and not just Trump but you and me are out to end “Our Democracy™.” What did they think would happen? . . .
Read the whole thing. As I say, I’m hesitant to place blame without clear evidence, but emotionally? Yeah, I’m as angry about this as anyone else, and giving the finger to the media is OK with me.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, has been pictured for the first time.
Cooks, 20, was on the roof of a manufacturing plant over 130 yards away from Trump’s rally at Butler Farm Show grounds on Saturday when he took fire at the former president — grazing Trump’s ear and killing one rally attendee.
Immediately after he began shooting, Secret Service snipers took the 20-year-old out. He was found with an AR-style semi-automatic assault rifle and was wearing a shirt for a popular gun YouTube channel, Demolition Ranch.
One former classmate, who confirmed photos of Crooks, told The Post, “He didn’t seem like really weird or anything. I would have pegged him as a Republican.”
The classmate added: “He was more of a loner. He probably had a friend group, but not many friends.
Asked why he wasn’t in the 2022 yearbook, the classmate said “Maybe he didn’t come back after Covid.”
Crooks grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, Pa., a village about 40 miles south of Trump’s rally in Butler.
According to state voter status records, he was a registered Republican.
He also made a single $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on Jan. 20, 2021 — President Biden’s Inauguration Day, the Intercept reported.
At the time of the donation, Crooks was 17 years old. He registered to vote upon turning 18 in September of that same year as a member of the GOP, records show.
Crooks was a member of the 2022 graduating class at Bethel Park High School, the school district confirmed Sunday morning.
Video shows him walking across a stage to accept his diploma.
He also received a $500 National Math and Science Initative Star Award during his graduating year, TribLive reported.
Why Crooks fired on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is unclear.
Early Sunday the FBI officially confirmed the Post’s reporting, calling Crooks the “subject involved” in the attack on Trump.
A loner math geek — of course. It all makes sense now. It’s never the gregarious English majors who commit these atrocities.
SALENA ZITO: “Myself, my daughter and my son-in-law were just 3 feet from the President.” https://t.co/5QZMsEtMB1
I'm thinking, they withheld the name till they locked, cleaned, and pulled down all of his social media. It doesn't take 8 hours to run fingerprints and get his ID.
We may never see anything about him beyond what the FBI chooses to release.
These are my suspicions as well — once the FBI gets involved, the suspect’s social media accounts disappear, so that if he did say anything on Facebook, Reddit, etc., that would give us a sense of his motive, nobody but the FBI can know about it. That’s why I can guarantee you that the shooter is not an anti-Semite or a white supremacist or any kind of “right-wing extremist,” because if that were the case, we would have learned about it many hours ago. One of my acquaintances believes this assassination attempt was a CIA op and, while I am dubious of his theory, I can’t prove it’s wrong, because the FBI has successfully suppressed every independent source of knowledge about the suspect’s motive.
Another miserable week for the Senators, thanks largely to our “closer” Vicente Romo, who lost two of our three games against the Reds and was also responsible for one of our two losses in Boston against the Red Sox. (They swept the two-game series.) At 43-58, we are tied with Oakland for last place in our division, 21 games behind Pete’s Braves, and I’m having serious doubts that we can get to .500 this season. Still, no surrender and all that, but unless his card is a lot better next year, I think we’re going to say goodbye to Señor Romo after this season. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
This news broke within the past hour and, at this point, nobody can say for certain what happened during Donald Trump’s speech at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The sound of gunshots was reportedly heard, Trump appeared to grab at his neck, then went to the ground, and then was escorted offstage by Secret Service agents.
UPDATE 6:55 p.m. ET: It appears that Trump may have been hit, but perhaps just grazed, as he was able to pump his fist and urge the crowd to “fight” before Secret Service got him offstage. First the shots:
Former President Trump was shot in the side of the head on stage at a rally in an apparent assassination attempt.
What sounded like gunshots rang out just about five minutes into his speech shortly after 6 p.m., sending Trump to the ground as Secret Service agents jumped in to cover him. Sources said the investigation is ongoing and they are looking into if the shots were from a BB gun.
After the initial shot rang out, apparently grazing Trump, the rest of the shots that could be heard were gunfire from law enforcement, sources said.
A streak of blood could be seen on the right side of his face.
Soldiers in military gear were seen rushing into the rally.
Nine shots could be heard in video of the incident, including three before Trump ducked.
So that’s what we’ve got so far, and it will take a while to sort through the facts and figure out what actually happened. Don’t jump to conclusions. To call it “an apparent assassination attempt” is fine, but appearances can be deceiving. Until we have more definite information, we don’t know what happened, and should avoid pretending as if we do know. Patience!
Butler County District Attorney Richard A. Goldinger confirmed to multiple news sources that former President Donald Trump was grazed by gunfire at a rally in Butler, Pa., Saturday.
Goldinger added that the shooter was dead, as well as one person in the audience.
No information was available about the audience member who was shot or the shooter at this time. . . .
Trump’s campaign said in a statement after he was rushed off stage that he was fine and being checked out.
“President Trump thanks law enforcement and first responders for their quick action during this heinous act,” spokesman Steven Cheung said. “He is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility. More details will follow.”
The Secret Service echoed in its own statement that “the former President is safe.”
Until the shooter is identified, we know nothing about the motive. Yes, it was an apparent assassination attempt, but we must wait for more confirmed information to actually know why this happened.
UPDATE 9:05 p.m. ET: The shooter was observed crawling on a rooftop outside the rally with a rifle and, after he opened fire — and barely missed killing Trump — was taken out by the Secret Service. Failure to secure that rooftop before the rally is certain to be widely criticized. We probably won’t know the identity of the shooter tonight, so until we do, I’ll just let this post stand, and do another post if and when we learn anything significant.
JUST IN: A guy outside the rally saw the shooter crawling on a roof and attempted to warn police and the Secret Service.
"We noticed a guy bear crawling on the roof with a rifle."
"I'm standing there pointing at him for two to three minutes, and the Secret Service is looking at… pic.twitter.com/27h6qf3uUS
