I’m a bit tired tonight and I don’t have anything profound to say. I see that some folks ran a pretty sophisticated covert operation on Sen. Bob Menendez. It’s somewhere between what we’d expect the CIA to do, although you would hope with more success, and a James O’Keefe special gone wrong. And Tucker Carlson was in on the game.
An escort who appeared on a video claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.
The woman identified a lawyer who approached her and a friend to make the videotape, according to affidavits obtained by the Post. That man has in turn identified another lawyer who gave him a script for the tape and paid him to find women to fabricate the claims, the affidavits say.
The escort was one of two women who taped videos that seems to support a tipster’s allegations that Menendez had patronized prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic.
FBI agents conducting interviews in the Dominican Republic have found no evidence to back up the tipster’s allegations, according to two people briefed on their work.
Menendez has denied the prostitution claims and called them entirely false “smears” used by enemies to try to defeat him in his recent re-election campaign and his selection as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…
…The women’s videotaped claims, with their faces obscured, were played on the conservative Web site The Daily Caller. The news site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic…They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”
But in an affidavit obtained Monday, one of the women on the tape, who describes herself as an escort, said she and a colleague were offered money by a lawyer to read from a script. The woman said she was surreptitiously videotaped implicating Menendez and Melgen.
I’d check to see if James O’Keefe traveled to the Dominican Republic in the pertinent time frame. But this looks like part of a broader conspiracy.
I could give you some good conspiracy stuff but, again, I am tuckered out.
If I were Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy, I’d treat this like the second coming of Watergate. Or Benghazi!!!!!
Also, too, why is the FBI investigating whether or not a senator broke a law in the Dominican Republic? Are we now subject to prosecution in the United States for crimes we commit on vacation in foreign countries?
Is this even illegal there?
What’s more disturbing is the seeming lack of interest by the media and the feds in tracking down the sources of this apparent scam. Paying off people to bear falso witness is the real crime here, but nobody’s interested in that. Might make O’Keefe or the GOP mad.
But, but, but …. Benghazi,
You don’t understand nothing matter but Benghazi
Obama ignored Benghazi, that is the real story,
Quit being irrelevant, only Benghazi matters for any real investigations.
Besides with the sequester the FBI would just be wasting money we don’t have investigating some prank played here, no real harm, no foul right??????
BTW did I mention we should be investigating Benghazi, not something that isn’t news any more?
Good lines for GOpers to learn and practice in case any real investigation is ever done here.
“sex tourism”, to the extent that it involves underage prostitutes, IS a crime in the US.
Perhaps that was what got the FBI involved. Or the financial side of it.
It could be the beginning of a RW tide of desperation.
http://crooksandliars.com/jamie/twitchy-fabricating-story-here
We’re in for a bumpy ride to 2014.
So, what happened in the Dominican Republic should have stayed in the Dominican Republic?
You write:
Why not?
We are subject to arrest and detention w/out the right to legal representation for thought crimes if we are foolish enough to make the thoughts publicly known and they have some appreciable effect upon others.
We are subject to assassination w/out trial if we are believed…that’s believed, not proven…to be active “enemies of the state.”
Are we also now subject to prosecution in the United States…or at the very least media assassination…for crimes we may or may not have committed on vacation in foreign countries if someone in a position of power finds it to be politically and/or financially expedient to do so? Damned right we are!!!
Rule of law?
Rule of power, Booman.
And it happened on your watch. With your approval.
Welcome to 1984, brudda.
How’s you like it?
We are all Bradley Manning now. He just acted on his beliefs.
You…and I and many others…are acting upon our own beliefs. Who’s to say when or where the line between criminality and dissent will be redrawn during a crisis?
WTFU.
AG
You need to retune your instrument.
My watch?
Fine. Let’s rewind history and erase all the people who stood up against DeLay and Frist and Rove and Libby and Bolton and Wolfowitz and Condi and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Butch.
Let’s get rid of those people, play it forward, and see what happens on your watch.
You’re like a guy who walks on thin ice and then complains that your rescuers haven’t eliminated thin ice. Our country is still fucked up, but the keys have been taken away from the people who were fucking every single little thing up every single fucking day.
You should be at least a teensy bit grateful that some people worked to make that happen, and are working to make sure we don’t go back there.
Y’know what, Booman?
You’re 1/2 right.
Let’s “erase history” but let’s do it this way:
Let’s get rid of all the people who stood up against “DeLay and Frist and Rove and Libby and Bolton and Wolfowitz and Condi and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Butch” and then promptly lay down again when Obama took another, subtler tack towards the same economic imperialist foreign policy/domestic security state goals.
Look around, bubba.
We got drones flying over Brooklyn now.
Over your house too, soon enough.
Afghanistan West.
Lissen up, man…a kinder, gentler, media-enforced security state is still a security state. We are all Bradley Manning now. If not “now”…soon enough.
Bet on it.
To paraphrase an ongoing meme from one of our wonderful
criminalfinancial institutions…”Who’s in your wallet?”And who’s watching your back yard, too?
WTFU.
AG
Heh. Drones over Brooklyn? The FAA believes the Alitalia crew enough to call in the FBI, so I’m sure they saw something, but it was almost certainly a toy quadrotor helicopter, like these.
I mean, it could be NYPD with more MIC-grade hardware, but for the sort of snooping NYPD wants to do, the 400ft FAA limit is more than enough altitude and keeps you well out of commercial airliner flightpaths…
-Jay-
So, you are now condoning this kind of shit? Amazing.
We have a character assassination squad out to get his guy, and you approve.
That is totally unacceptable. Why don’t you get your ass OUT of this board?
Giving AG this opportunity to get on his unenlightening soapbox was entirely unneccessary. The Dominican Republic is a territory of the United States. That’s an explanation for the FBI’s involvement in this case, right?
No. The Dominican Republic is a sovereign independent nation.
You may be thinking of Puerto Rico.
Booman, thanks for the gentle, reasonable correction. I wasn’t thinking of PR; I was just mistaken in believing there remained some territorial status for the DR.
Re. the FBI’s investigation, would it have a role to play in helping investigate claims that a U.S. citizen may have broken laws, particularly laws involving something as culturally and politically sensitive as the child sex trade? With the U.S. citizen (and others in the U.S. who may have assisted them) now unavaliable to Dominican law enforcement authorities to recieve questioning, perhaps there is a reasonable role for the FBI to cooperate with other countries to prevent international lawbreaking.
Your question about whether the FBI would be collecting evidence on behalf of prosecution in the U.S. has become a good and reasonable one, though. Normally, I’d assume that the FBI was assisting the DR in putting together a prosecution case on the island, but precedences are being created often these days, aren’t they?
No, numbnuts, the Dominican republic is not “a territory of the United States.”
That’s why is has the word “Republic” in its name.
Duh.
Oh.
You’re confusing alla them brownish-to-whitish people who speak Spanish as a primary language and live (or lived if they are immigrants) on islands inna Caribbean, right? Ever meet one? I doubt it.
Here’s a hint.
Merengue.
You could look it up, although if you are too brain dead to know the differences between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic I doubt that you will.
WTFU.
This is America, son.
Speak Spanish.
Or at least respect those that do.
AG
we already know you are better than the rest of us; no need to be nasty about it
AG is simply a superior form of commenter. He says crap that means exactly what he wants it to mean, and nothing more.
Also nothing less.
Count on it.
But don’t try to interpret it, because if you aren’t AG, well,….
You just don’t understand.
Capish?
It’s “capisce,” numbnuts.
You could look it up.
But of course…you don’t.
Why?
Because you’re dataguy!!!
Self-referential to the end, you have all of the data but none of the understanding.
Damn this site is devolving!!!
Rapidly.
AG
How does what I wrote “condone” what is happening.
Oh.
Wait a minute.
It’s dataguy. Irony and reading comprehension-
impaled…err, ahh…impaired.Nevermind.
Not yore freind…
Emily Litella
Non-NJ’er here. Is Menendez well-liked in the Dem Senate caucus? Enough for them to make a huge stink about this on his behalf (as they would, say, if Tom Harkin had been the target)?
Is there anyone in either political party that would rush to defend one of their own – regardless of how well liked – when rumors of sexual indiscretions surface? How many of such rumors in the past two decades have been true and how many false? The list of the former is long and the latter is apparently limited to Menendez and possibly McCain.
One more. The Tennessee Democrat who was texting during the SOTU, to a young woman…
She was his daughter, that he had not known of until quite recently.
mostly wait and see – have been attempted smear campaigns in the past, so that was the assumption. and btw, Menendez got divorced in 2005
Well, it was easy enough to recruit the women. Rush’s booking secretary probably has them on speed dial. Imagine their relief when they were told they didn’t have to perform any sex acts this time.
Do we know that Limbaugh even likes women? He’s been married .. what .. 8 times now?
He apparently does like them. But does he beat them too? Why would so many divorce such a rich pig? He must be an absolute piece of crap around the house. Otherwise, someone would stick with the pot of honey, wouldn’t they?
I don’t know. He obviously has anger issues. Personally, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if he was found out to be having his way with both young men and women. After all, what was he doing to the Dominican Republic with pills for?
“Are we now subject to prosecution in the United States for crimes we commit on vacation in foreign countries?”
Yup. It was a liberal victory, as I recall.
“Are we now subject to prosecution in the United States for crimes we commit on vacation in foreign countries?”
Yep. Nothing new here. Congress can choose to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction both in criminal (e.g., the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; sex tourism, etc.) and civil matters (e.g., taxation) when it chooses to. The only nexus required is citizenship.
Thank you.
These people are living in the past.
Pre-security state.
Pre-9/11.
Pre-Homeboy Security.
Pre-extraordinary rendition.
Pre-Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Pre-Bradley Manning and the awful attempts at framing Julian Assange in order to get him back into U.S. hands for his own little Bradley Manning treatment.
Pre-the heavy handed Bush.
Pre-the kinder/gentler-but-OH-so-much-more-efficient Obama.
They are living in a media-induced dream world despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Sleeple.
Too bad.
Sigh.
So it goes.
Straight the fuck down the ol’ rabbit hole.
Thanks for trying, though.
Later…
AG
Considering the timing of the piece and considering Adelson’s illgotten fortune, it’s not unlikely that he dirtied his hands in this. Why stop at just funding the SuperPacs’ rotten candidates? Kind of a sporting game for a guy with Adelson’s bent.