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The Donald Trump hush money trial seemed to give way overnight to the Hunter Biden federal gun-charge trial, with both stories competing to soak up all the oxygen in the room. Lost in the shuffle, however, is the no-less compelling corruption trial of New Jersey US Senator Bob Menendez. That trial has drawn out almost unnoticed in a Manhattan court room, with a key witness testifying on Friday that he gave Menendez a Mercedes in exchange for his help in dropping a probe by the New Jersey attorney general. Award-winning columnist Mike Kelly of NorthJersey.com has been keeping a close eye on the courtroom proceedings. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to fill listeners in on the details they might have missed in the legal drama of “Gold Bar Bob”.
“Senator Menendez has been claiming that he sees his job as a Senator is to help his constituents,” Kelly told Berman and Riedel. “Well, I think when someone’s been indicted or investigated and you call up the attorney general of the state of New Jersey and say, ‘I want to have a discussion about that’, I think there’s something more than just helping your clients there, and I think you need to disclose to your constituents when you do that sort of thing. This isn’t calling somebody up and saying, ‘Hey, can you get a veteran’s check to one of my constituents’?”
Meanwhile, Senator Menendez’s wife is scheduled to stand trial herself in July, but that might not happen, as she has been recovering from breast cancer complications. Kelly is among those who feel the Menendez strategy of saying the Mercedes was for his wife will go nowhere. “In my opinion, it’s a major question whether she will ever go on trial, and exactly what her status is, we don’t know. Menendez himself is saying to everyone- the only thing he’ll say to people is, ‘Stay tuned for the cross-examination’, and this is important because it’s in cross-examination that the defense is able to raise questions or poke holes in testimony, so we’ll see how that goes. The problem here, I think, for Menendez is that there is this connection of text messages and other things that leads through his wife to him, and is the jury buying this connective tissue, so to speak, of circumstances that have led to various favorable deals.”
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