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NZ Herald
4 days ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
William Webster, first to lead FBI and CIA, dies at 101
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter asked then-Attorney General Griffin B. Bell to begin looking for a new FBI director. 'The bureau had been taking some rough blows,' Bell later told the New York Times, 'and we were looking for somebody who was absolutely above reproach.' At the time, the FBI was reeling from disclosures that agents had participated in break-ins, illegally opened the mail of people under surveillance and spied on civil rights leaders. As Carter's nominee for director, Webster told the Senate during confirmation hearings that the FBI 'is not above the law' and should not 'wage war on private citizens to discredit them'. Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post journalist and the author of books on law enforcement and intelligence, said in an interview that Webster was 'the perfect person' to head the FBI and CIA. 'Both agencies in the past had abused their power,' Kessler said. 'He restored their credibility and gave the people assurance that these agencies were really operating in the public interest.' He added that Webster oversaw a transformative period at the FBI and credited him with turning 'the bureau into a much more proactive force'. As FBI director during the late 1970s and early 1980, Webster oversaw an undercover corruption investigation known as Abscam that ensnared several members of Congress. During the operation, an undercover agent posed as an Arab sheikh and the owner of Abdul Enterprises, hence the name of the operation. The disguised agents held meetings with senators and House members at a Playboy Club in New Jersey and aboard a yacht off the Florida coast. Using hidden cameras and microphones, federal authorities recorded politicians accepting US$400,000 (about $420,000 at 1980 exchange rates) in bribes from the fake Arab sheikh in exchange for political favours. One senator and five congressmen were eventually convicted of crimes including bribery. In the early 1980s, Webster also oversaw the formation of the bureau's elite counter-terrorism force known as the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Envisioned as a domestic Special Operations unit, the HRT was modelled after the Army's top-secret Delta Force – with one key difference. During a tour of Delta facilities at Fort Bragg in the early 1980s, Webster observed the commandos conducting a simulated raid on a group of terrorists. Webster, impressed with the results, saw merit in the tactics used by Delta operators and inquired about what kind of equipment they carried on missions. He was told they employed only the latest technology, including night-vision goggles. 'I don't see any handcuffs,' Webster replied. An Army Major General then explained that his soldiers didn't end missions by reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights. 'It's not my job to arrest people,' the general said. Under Webster's guidance, HRT members were trained first as law enforcement officers and secondly as elite sharpshooters. Since its inception in 1983, the HRT has taken part in rescue operations around the country and saved countless lives. Webster's success at the FBI was noticed in the Reagan White House during the late 1980s, when the administration was struggling with the fallout from Iran-Contra. The illegal secret operation involved selling weapons to Iran and diverting the profits to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras. Investigations by Congress and a special prosecutor implicated the CIA and suggested the involvement of William J. Casey, the agency's director. Casey resigned from office in February 1987 after a malignant tumour was diagnosed in his brain. He died three months later. Seeking a replacement known for probity, Reagan tapped Webster to clean up the CIA. Webster swiftly fired two employees connected to Iran-Contra, demoted another and issued reprimands to four others, according to Kessler's 1992 book, Inside the CIA. In addition, Webster established policies that provided more oversight of clandestine operations. He hired more lawyers to review the legality of missions and gave more powers to the CIA's inspector general. Thomas Twetten, a veteran CIA officer who served in high-ranking positions, said in an interview that Webster was considered an unlikely candidate to lead the agency. He had spent little time overseas and was unfamiliar with practices used in the collection of intelligence. 'He was not a foreign-affairs expert. That was not at all his strong point,' said Twetten, who later served as a CIA deputy director. 'He came from a law-and-order background as a judge.' Twetten said Webster excelled as a manager at the CIA. To compensate for his lack of foreign affairs experience, Webster tapped Richard J. Kerr, a respected intelligence analyst, to serve as his deputy. He also persuaded a covert officer to come out of retirement to lead the agency's cloak-and-dagger branch. That officer, Dick Stolz, proved to be one of Webster's best hires, Twetten said. Stolz was a revered figure in the intelligence community, and bringing him back to the CIA added stability to a deeply shaken agency. 'You have to give him a lot of credit,' Twetten said. 'He did fine because he let everybody play to their strengths.' Webster was responsible for establishing specialised counterintelligence and counternarcotics centres, units that tracked spies and drug rings in countries around the world. He also sought to patch up a long-standing rivalry between the FBI and CIA. In particular, he improved co-ordination between the agencies on counterintelligence, and he helped establish a programme – run jointly by the CIA and FBI in Washington – to recruit Russians to spy on their own Government. In the end, Webster was credited with presiding over a period of relative quiet at the agency. 'He was criticised for not being a strategic thinker, but that's not why he was selected,' Vincent Cannistraro, a former high-ranking CIA counterterrorism official, told the Post in 1991. 'He was selected to calm troubled waters.' Webster was known as a man to be taken seriously. But on occasion, he displayed a lighter side. For instance, as the 14th director of central intelligence, he signed some of his correspondence – with winking double-0 James Bond flair – as '00-14'. William Hedgcock Webster was born in St Louis on March 6, 1924, and grew up in suburban Webster Groves, Missouri. His father owned small businesses and his mother was a homemaker. After serving as a Navy officer during World War II, Webster graduated in 1947 from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and he received a law degree in 1949 from Washington University in St Louis. He was recalled to Navy duty during the Korean War. He worked in private practice in St Louis, representing major corporate clients such as Mobil Oil, and served briefly in the early 1960s as US attorney in eastern Missouri. In 1970, President Nixon appointed Webster to a judgeship on the US District Court for Eastern Missouri. In 1973, Nixon appointed him to the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St Louis. In one notable case on the appeals court, Webster ruled that the University of Missouri could not deny funding or facilities to a gay rights organisation on campus, citing the First Amendment's protection of free assembly. The university appealed Webster's ruling and petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case. The Supreme Court declined. Webster was lean and patrician in appearance and ascetic in his tastes. A Christian Scientist, Webster largely abstained from alcohol. His chief indulgence was tennis, and his partners over the years included President George H.W. Bush, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and actor Zsa Zsa Gabor. After leaving the CIA in 1991, Webster continued to be called on to handle sensitive matters. He chaired the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which advised the secretary of homeland security about terrorism threats. He also chaired a Justice Department commission that investigated the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, in which an Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, was eventually convicted of killing 13 people and wounding more than two dozen. The commission suggested that the FBI review its policies to clarify the chain of command for counterterrorism operations. In 1950, Webster married the former Drusilla Lane. She died in 1984 after refusing medical treatment for cancer, citing her Christian Science beliefs. Webster married the former Lynda Clugston in 1990. In addition to his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Drusilla Patterson, William H. Webster jnr, and Katherine Roessle; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. Webster made a flurry of news in February 2019, when his role in a reverse sting operation was publicised. He and his wife became targets of a Jamaica-based phone scammer who became increasingly threatening and did not realise he was dealing with the former director of the FBI and the CIA. Working with law enforcement, Webster captured the man on tape trying to extort money and helped ensure he received a long prison term.
Politico
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Former Sen. Bob Menendez reports to prison for 11-year sentence
Former Sen. Bob Menendez began his 11-year prison sentence Tuesday morning, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said. The New Jersey Democrat, 71, was at the height of his power in 2023, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when federal prosecutors in New York revealed allegations based on a yearslong investigation that he'd sold his office for piles of cash and bars of gold. Now, he's at Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania. Following a two-month trial last summer, a jury found Menendez guilty on 16 counts, including bribery, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, obstruction of justice, extortion and conspiring to commit those crimes along with a pair of businesspeople. The businesspeople — Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American, and Fred Daibes, a prominent real estate developer — already began their sentences of eight and seven years, respectively. Menendez is one of only a few senators to have ever served time and the last since another New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Harrison Williams Jr., went to prison in the 1980s after being caught up in the FBI's Abscam sting operation. Before he was sentenced in January, Menendez and his attorney asked for mercy — arguing he'd already been punished, having lost public office and being subjected to widespread mockery as 'Gold Bar Bob.' 'Other than family, I have lost everything I ever cared about,' a tearful Menendez told U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein. Present in the courtroom were his two adult children, including his son, Rep. Rob Menendez. Stein did not spare him, though, and said Menendez had succumbed to greed and hubris, going from someone who had stood up to corruption in New Jersey politics early in his career to someone who now himself was corrupt. 'Somewhere along the way, I don't know where, you lost your way,' Stein said. Menendez has in recent weeks taken to social media to decry the case against him, posts that many view as attempts to get a pardon from President Donald Trump. The federal investigation of Menendez appears to have begun in 2019, when Trump was president. Menendez, Daibes and Hana are still appealing their convictions, with a team of experienced attorneys who have vowed to fight as long as it takes. There are issues in the case, including the scope of the Constitution's 'speech or debate' protections, that seem destined to intrigue appeals court judges and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court. In particular, Menendez's appeal focuses on rulings Stein made during the trial. Menendez objected to some of the evidence that prosecutors were allowed to share with jurors. Then, after the trial, prosecutors admitted even some evidence the judge ruled should not be shown to jurors was provided to jurors on a laptop they had access to during their deliberations. While it wasn't enough to keep him from starting his sentence, Menendez persuaded one judge in three-judge appeals court panel to last week back his request for bail pending appeal. During a separate hearing, Daibes attorney Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general for President George W. Bush, also seemed to get appeals court judges' attention on the speech or debate issues in the case.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
It's judgment day for Bob Menendez
A federal judge will sentence former Sen. Bob Menendez on Wednesday for selling his office — an extraordinary fall even for a politician from a state as notoriously transactional as New Jersey. Menendez resigned from the Senate last summer after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of corruption. Prosecutors said he misused his power to help a trio of New Jersey businesspeople and a pair of foreign governments in exchange for bribes that literally filled his house with stacks of cash and bars of gold. It marked the end of a 50-year political career that made Menendez one of the most powerful people in New Jersey and gave him immense influence on the world stage. Prosecutors want the 71-year-old imprisoned for 15 years, arguing Menendez is among the most corrupt members of the Senate in American history. 'Menendez's conduct may be the most serious for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic,' prosecutors wrote this month to U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who will decide Menendez's immediate fate. But he is not expected to go to prison right away, and there is also a possibility he could be pardoned by President Donald Trump or persuade a higher court to overturn his convictions. Only a dozen other senators have ever been charged with crimes, and just three others have ever been sentenced to prison. Even among those senators, Menendez stands out. According to prosecutors, he is the first to be convicted of an abuse of a leadership position on a Senate committee and the first person ever to be convicted of serving as a foreign agent while being a public official. For anyone who wants to hate on New Jersey as a hotbed of political intrigue and misdeeds, the last senator to go to prison was another New Jersey Democrat — Harrison Williams, who more than 40 years ago was caught up in the FBI sting operation known as Abscam. Perhaps the most damning stain on Menendez's reputation is the foreign intrigues: The jury found that in exchange for money and gold from New Jersey businesspeople, Menendez used his power to aid Egypt and Qatar while under oath to serve America and while leading the Senate's foreign relations committee. Menendez was also found guilty in a scheme where he tried to interfere in state and federal justice systems to help men who were bribing him, including one who pleaded guilty and took the stand against him. The charges and Menendez's behavior was also fodder for late night show hosts and water cooler wows. Menendez kept some of the bribes stuffed almost comically into bags, boots and jackets around the home he shared with his wife, Nadine, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. And the senator's defense team argued the couple largely led separate lives even after they were married, attempting, at times, to throw her under the bus. The sprawling corruption case, brought by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was not Menendez's first brush with the law. In 2017, other corruption charges ended in a mistrial in New Jersey federal court. He dusted off, vowed never to forget those who were digging his grave and won reelection in 2018. By then, according to prosecutors, he was already enmeshed in some of the corruption that proved to be his undoing. Menendez is still holding out hope that he can undo this conviction, though. This week, his attorneys asked Stein to let Menendez avoid reporting to prison pending an appeal. This means even after the sentence is handed down, the case is unlikely to be over. Menendez and his two co-defendants also being sentenced Wednesday — New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, a businessperson with ties to the Egyptian government — have made clear they plan to appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, from there, to the Supreme Court if necessary. They'll try to relitigate a series of thorny legal issues that kept coming up during the trial, forcing Stein to rule on questions that the Supreme Court itself has perhaps not fully grappled with. Perhaps the most uncertain questions were about the boundaries of the 'speech or debate' immunity that the Constitution gives to members of Congress. 'This court surely believes it answered those questions correctly,' Menendez's attorneys wrote to Stein this week. 'But it can just as surely recognize that the Second Circuit could answer them the other way.' Indeed, history suggests Menendez's chances are decent: Of the 12 senators previously prosecuted, eight beat their charges either during trial or after trial. That history begins with Sen. John Smith, who was found not guilty in the early 1800s of charges that he conspired with Aaron Burr to commit treason, and extends to the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, whose 2008 conviction for failing to report gifts was eventually thrown out because of government misconduct. Menendez has a top-tier legal team. One attorney, Avi Weitzman, has an official biography that boasts he's never represented someone who was sent to prison on criminal charges. Another, Yaakov Roth, represented former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in his bribery case and argued on behalf of 'Bridgegate' defendant Bridget Kelly and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco at the Supreme Court — which overturned all three convictions. But, so far, Menendez has kept losing in court while facing off against experienced federal prosecutors who took down sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, among others. During the trial, jurors saw and even had the chance to touch some of the booty found inside Menendez's home. They heard how the FBI was sure Menendez and Daibes' fingerprints or DNA was on some of the cash. They were read text messages and shown cell phone location data that gave hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute accounts of Menendez and those accused of scheming with him. The jury saw a series of star witnesses: A man who pleaded guilty to bribing the senator and his wife, Nadine, who claimed the senator summoned her during a backyard meeting about a scheme by ringing a bell. A former New Jersey attorney general talked about a 'gross' interaction with Menendez. A former Senate aide who testified about the senator's 'unusual' behavior toward Egypt during a period prosecutors say the senator was taking bribes to help the country obtain military aid. An undercover FBI investigator who overheard Menendez's then-girlfriend Nadine say during a dinner with a high-ranking Egyptian official, 'What else can the love of my life do for you?' Throughout the trial, Menendez took a different tact than his co-defendants, who didn't deny giving him or his wife gifts — gifts being the key word, not bribes. Menendez did not accept this version of events, instead bringing in witnesses to argue it's possible that he had been hoarding his own cash because of some impulses drilled into him by his Cuban family. Menendez also tried to shift blame to Nadine, whose trial was separated from his and repeatedly delayed as she battles cancer. The gold? That was her family gold, Menendez's attorneys argued. Her trial is now set for March. The two-month trial itself was also unexpectedly boring at times. For what seemed like days on end, prosecutors relied on FBI agents who had no particular knowledge of the case to read aloud to the jury line after line of text messages, emails and other documents. This tested the patience of the judge and the jurors as the trial stretched through some of the hottest days of a New York summer. And the whole affair, historic as it was, was overshadowed by Trump's state criminal trial, which was going on in another courthouse a brisk two-minute walk around the corner. During a break in the Trump trial, a few curious reporters and spectators who had been monitoring Trump's case came over to the federal courthouse to peer in on the Menendez trial, making it a literal sideshow. Eventually, the complexities of managing a document-intensive case — necessary because so much of the communication among the witnesses was done in text messages and emails, particularly texts from Nadine — may come to haunt prosecutors. In a series of revelations after the jury came back with a verdict, prosecutors said they had inadvertently given jurors access to material a judge ruled they should not have seen. Menendez's legal team has tried to get Stein to toss the verdicts because of that, but Stein refused, saying defense attorneys had a chance to catch the errors, and it's unlikely the jury saw the problematic evidence. Menendez may also be hoping for some kind of pardon from Trump, who previously commuted the sentence of a Florida doctor who was part of the first corruption case brought against Menendez nearly a decade ago. (The doctor was later convicted on other charges.) Ironically, Menendez and the doctor beat those charges in part by arguing that prosecutors had never found 'a duffel bag stuffed with cash somewhere.' But this time around, federal investigators found a black duffel bag stuffed with cash. There is also another intriguing coincidence: Menendez wound up in the middle of the investigation that ensnared him this time apparently by accident. In May 2019, two FBI surveillance teams were sent to the Morton's steakhouse a few blocks from the White House to eavesdrop on a trio of Egyptian men seated at a table, including one who was the subject of their investigation. They were not there looking for Menendez, but then he showed up. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, today the public will see how much he may pay for wrongdoing.
Politico
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Politico
It's judgment day for Bob Menendez
A federal judge will sentence former Sen. Bob Menendez on Wednesday for selling his office — an extraordinary fall even for a politician from a state as notoriously transactional as New Jersey. Menendez resigned from the Senate last summer after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of corruption. Prosecutors said he misused his power to help a trio of New Jersey businesspeople and a pair of foreign governments in exchange for bribes that literally filled his house with stacks of cash and bars of gold. It marked the end of a 50-year political career that made Menendez one of the most powerful people in New Jersey and gave him immense influence on the world stage. Prosecutors want the 71-year-old imprisoned for 15 years, arguing Menendez is among the most corrupt members of the Senate in American history. 'Menendez's conduct may be the most serious for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic,' prosecutors wrote this month to U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who will decide Menendez's immediate fate. But he is not expected to go to prison right away, and there is also a possibility he could be pardoned by President Donald Trump or persuade a higher court to overturn his convictions. Only a dozen other senators have ever been charged with crimes, and just three others have ever been sentenced to prison. Even among those senators, Menendez stands out. According to prosecutors, he is the first to be convicted of an abuse of a leadership position on a Senate committee and the first person ever to be convicted of serving as a foreign agent while being a public official. For anyone who wants to hate on New Jersey as a hotbed of political intrigue and misdeeds, the last senator to go to prison was another New Jersey Democrat — Harrison Williams, who more than 40 years ago was caught up in the FBI sting operation known as Abscam. Perhaps the most damning stain on Menendez's reputation is the foreign intrigues: The jury found that in exchange for money and gold from New Jersey businesspeople, Menendez used his power to aid Egypt and Qatar while under oath to serve America and while leading the Senate's foreign relations committee. Menendez was also found guilty in a scheme where he tried to interfere in state and federal justice systems to help men who were bribing him, including one who pleaded guilty and took the stand against him. The charges and Menendez's behavior was also fodder for late night show hosts and water cooler wows. Menendez kept some of the bribes stuffed almost comically into bags, boots and jackets around the home he shared with his wife, Nadine, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. And the senator's defense team argued the couple largely led separate lives even after they were married, attempting, at times, to throw her under the bus. The sprawling corruption case, brought by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was not Menendez's first brush with the law. In 2017, other corruption charges ended in a mistrial in New Jersey federal court. He dusted off, vowed never to forget those who were digging his grave and won reelection in 2018. By then, according to prosecutors, he was already enmeshed in some of the corruption that proved to be his undoing. Menendez is still holding out hope that he can undo this conviction, though. This week, his attorneys asked Stein to let Menendez avoid reporting to prison pending an appeal. This means even after the sentence is handed down, the case is unlikely to be over. Menendez and his two co-defendants also being sentenced Wednesday — New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, a businessperson with ties to the Egyptian government — have made clear they plan to appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, from there, to the Supreme Court if necessary. They'll try to relitigate a series of thorny legal issues that kept coming up during the trial, forcing Stein to rule on questions that the Supreme Court itself has perhaps not fully grappled with. Perhaps the most uncertain questions were about the boundaries of the 'speech or debate' immunity that the Constitution gives to members of Congress. 'This court surely believes it answered those questions correctly,' Menendez's attorneys wrote to Stein this week. 'But it can just as surely recognize that the Second Circuit could answer them the other way.' Indeed, history suggests Menendez's chances are decent: Of the 12 senators previously prosecuted, eight beat their charges either during trial or after trial. That history begins with Sen. John Smith, who was found not guilty in the early 1800s of charges that he conspired with Aaron Burr to commit treason, and extends to the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, whose 2008 conviction for failing to report gifts was eventually thrown out because of government misconduct. Menendez has a top-tier legal team. One attorney, Avi Weitzman, has an official biography that boasts he's never represented someone who was sent to prison on criminal charges. Another, Yaakov Roth, represented former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in his bribery case and argued on behalf of 'Bridgegate' defendant Bridget Kelly and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco at the Supreme Court — which overturned all three convictions. But, so far, Menendez has kept losing in court while facing off against experienced federal prosecutors who took down sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, among others. During the trial, jurors saw and even had the chance to touch some of the booty found inside Menendez's home. They heard how the FBI was sure Menendez and Daibes' fingerprints or DNA was on some of the cash. They were read text messages and shown cell phone location data that gave hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute accounts of Menendez and those accused of scheming with him. The jury saw a series of star witnesses: A man who pleaded guilty to bribing the senator and his wife, Nadine, who claimed the senator summoned her during a backyard meeting about a scheme by ringing a bell. A former New Jersey attorney general talked about a 'gross' interaction with Menendez. A former Senate aide who testified about the senator's 'unusual' behavior toward Egypt during a period prosecutors say the senator was taking bribes to help the country obtain military aid. An undercover FBI investigator who overheard Menendez's then-girlfriend Nadine say during a dinner with a high-ranking Egyptian official, 'What else can the love of my life do for you?' Throughout the trial, Menendez took a different tact than his co-defendants, who didn't deny giving him or his wife gifts — gifts being the key word, not bribes. Menendez did not accept this version of events, instead bringing in witnesses to argue it's possible that he had been hoarding his own cash because of some impulses drilled into him by his Cuban family. Menendez also tried to shift blame to Nadine, whose trial was separated from his and repeatedly delayed as she battles cancer. The gold? That was her family gold, Menendez's attorneys argued. Her trial is now set for March. The two-month trial itself was also unexpectedly boring at times. For what seemed like days on end, prosecutors relied on FBI agents who had no particular knowledge of the case to read aloud to the jury line after line of text messages, emails and other documents. This tested the patience of the judge and the jurors as the trial stretched through some of the hottest days of a New York summer. And the whole affair, historic as it was, was overshadowed by Trump's state criminal trial, which was going on in another courthouse a brisk two-minute walk around the corner. During a break in the Trump trial, a few curious reporters and spectators who had been monitoring Trump's case came over to the federal courthouse to peer in on the Menendez trial, making it a literal sideshow. Eventually, the complexities of managing a document-intensive case — necessary because so much of the communication among the witnesses was done in text messages and emails, particularly texts from Nadine — may come to haunt prosecutors. In a series of revelations after the jury came back with a verdict, prosecutors said they had inadvertently given jurors access to material a judge ruled they should not have seen. Menendez's legal team has tried to get Stein to toss the verdicts because of that, but Stein refused, saying defense attorneys had a chance to catch the errors, and it's unlikely the jury saw the problematic evidence. Menendez may also be hoping for some kind of pardon from Trump, who previously commuted the sentence of a Florida doctor who was part of the first corruption case brought against Menendez nearly a decade ago. (The doctor was later convicted on other charges.) Ironically, Menendez and the doctor beat those charges in part by arguing that prosecutors had never found 'a duffel bag stuffed with cash somewhere.' But this time around, federal investigators found a black duffel bag stuffed with cash. There is also another intriguing coincidence: Menendez wound up in the middle of the investigation that ensnared him this time apparently by accident. In May 2019, two FBI surveillance teams were sent to the Morton's steakhouse a few blocks from the White House to eavesdrop on a trio of Egyptian men seated at a table, including one who was the subject of their investigation. They were not there looking for Menendez, but then he showed up. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, today the public will see how much he may pay for wrongdoing.
