It’s been a bad few weeks for Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, as he was recently been drawn up on bribery charges, with the first court date set for early May. Making the situation even more problematic for Menendex is that he looks even worse, even to those on the left as details leak out about what was going on with the bribery scandal.
In fact, after it was revealed that one of the precipitating events for one of the bribes he received related to his wife, Nadine Menendez, killed a man while driving her car, even MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell turned on Menendez and delivered a scathing monologue about him.
As background, Nadine was Menendez’s girlfriend in 2018. She hit and killed a pedestrian in Bogota, New Jersey, that year; according to a police report from the time, she struck 49-year-old Richard Koop with her Mercedes-Benz automobile, killing him.
That incident was highlighted on Wednesday in a report by the New York Times, in which that paper noted that police only submitted Nadine to “brief questioning,” and then quickly concluded she was not at fault. Further, the NYT reported that a witness claimed that those officers “appeared to know” who Nadine was, Menendez’s girlfriend, and so “treated her with striking deference.”
Then, that turned into yet another one of Menendez’s alleged bribes, as he and Nadine wanted to replace the damaged Mercedez, so, he allegedly worked to quash an otherwise unrelated prosecution in exchange for a Mercedez-Benz convertible valued at around $60,000.
Menendez, after the news of the accident came to light thanks to the NYT, said, “That was a tragic accident and obviously we think of the family.” That is what set off MSNBC’s O’Donnell, who sounded off on the Senator after playing a clip of Menendez making that obviously untrue claim.
“He’s lying. They don’t think of the family. They have never communicated with the dead man’s family in any way. In December of 2018, Robert Menendez’s girlfriend, who was on her way to becoming his second wife, hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street at 7:30 p.m. and killed him. His name was Richard Koop. He was 49 years old,” O’Donnell began.
“The New York Times reports today, ‘His body was thrown to the curb just steps from his home and badly mangled… The police reports indicate she was never tested for drugs or alcohol, and was allowed to leave the scene, not long before Mr. Koop was declared dead at a nearby hospital.’ Richard Koop’s sister told the New York Times, ‘The family really has had serious concerns over what we felt was a very sparse, one-sided investigation… We felt that the whole thing was very silently swept under the rug,'” he continued.
Showing how Menendez and his girlfriend really felt at the time, O’Donnell said, “The only problem Mrs. Menendez seemed to face after she killed someone was how to replace that damaged car. According to federal prosecutors, Robert Menendez and his wife took a bribe in the form of a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz C 300 convertible to replace the damaged car. The indictment of Robert Menendez and his wife contains a text message from her, saying, ‘All is GREAT! I’m so excited to get a car next week!‘”
He added, “So, you’ve killed a man with a car, and you are so excited to get a car next week – not even slightly traumatized about driving, not in any way. And the thing you say you will never forget is the bribe that got you the car, not the man you killed.”
O’Donnell added, “The indictment contains a text message that seemed creepy enough when all we knew it was describing was an alleged bribe. But now that we know that it is the reward Mrs. Menendez got after killing someone, it reads as sickeningly perverse. She wrote to New Jersey’s senior senator, ‘Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.l She got that car only because she killed someone with her previous car. And she calls herself a ‘proud owner’ of the new car. The bribe car. And while she’s at it, she congratulates her future husband – the senator – for taking what federal prosecutors call a bribe, for which they are now both criminal codefendants who have pleaded not guilty.”
Featured image credit: By United States Senate – https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=530951748386496&set=a.405480287600310, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116891210
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