Bob Menendez on Beef Young Girl
Continue Your Pants On
The Menendez-Dominican prostitute story, and why it's teetering.
Photograph past Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Exercise we actually take to root for Bob Menendez? The pride of the Union City, North.J., Democratic machine? The senator who allegedly blocked an attorney's promotion considering she worked on a (flimsy) corruption instance against him? The guy who clings so bitterly to the American embargo on Cuba that he one time blocked two of Barack Obama'due south scientific discipline advisers—scientific discipline advisers!—until he was reassured that history's to the lowest degree effective blockade was safety?
Possibly. Menendez has earned a 1-day respite from the life of an "embattled senator." ABC News and the Washington Post accept sprayed iced water on a four-month-old allegation that the senator hired underaged prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Nexis de los Santos Santana, a woman who had told ABC News just before the 2012 ballot that she'd slept with Menendez, has recanted in an affidavit. ABC News is also reporting that information technology had been led to the story by "Republican operatives who insisted on anonymity."
After scrutinizing the allegations in 2012, ABC News decided not to report them. Simply the GOP operatives walked the story over to the Daily Caller, the website founded in 2010 past Tucker Carlson to outscoop the mainstream media. And on Nov. 1, 2012, Carlson's site reported that "2 women from the Dominican Republic told The Daily Caller that Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez paid them for sex."
The mainstream media largely ignored it earlier Election Day, and Menendez won re-election. But the story stayed alive, becoming part of the "undernews," equally erstwhile Slate blogger/electric current Daily Caller blogger Mickey Kaus has dubbed "stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards." Those standards are all over the ABC News story, which refers to the DC as a mere "conservative spider web site." Withal mere "website" condition didn't stop the DC from Incepting this story into the minds of New Jersey Democrats, or stop reporters from asking Democrats to respond to the "reports." Considering Menendez is accused of many things, and because he'due south had to pay $58,500 for flights on a donor's airplane and because that donor, Salomon Melgen, has received favors from Menendez totally unconnected to the unsubstantiated sex parties, "reports" could mean annihilation. To save time, everyone assumed Menendez was running from the accusation with all the sexual activity.
Menendez, the sort of political leader who corrects for a grimy public image past wearing crimson, white, and blue shirts and ties, didn't have to worry about the prostitution rumor until Melgen's office was raided in Jan 2013, and the printing started covering his very real financial scandals. Since then, he's stuck to one talking point and repeated it like a chorus of "Hey Jude." His accusers are "anonymous, nameless, faceless individuals on a Spider web site," purveyors of "smears."
Menendez responded to the "smears" with a crunch team. They earned their keep. Past mid-February, the New York Times' news pages were calling Menendez "capable of bare-knuckle politics" and a "brawler who once wore a bulletproof vest to prove in a federal corruption case against a powerful political mentor." And the sexual allegations against Menendez began to fall apart. In early February, Univision interviewed a woman with the same name as one of the supposed Dominican prostitutes who insisted she had never met the senator. The Miami Herald "combed the Dominican Republic to find evidence that Menendez consorted with prostitutes" but found nothing.
The conservative media, in turn, became contemptuous of the MSM's desire to protect embattled Democrats. Ever since Matt Drudge and not Newsweek broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, this has been conservative narrative—one confirmed by the 2011 Anthony Weiner scandal, when Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz tweeted that the key testify was probably simulated.
The upshot of this well-earned paranoia is a deductive, show-this-incorrect-why-don't-you theory of the scoop. The Daily Caller noted that "one of the clues that Weiner wasn't telling the truth was that he was post-obit a lot of immature girls on Twitter," and—hey! —Menendez was following "a very young-looking Dominican girl on Twitter." It turned out that the girl lived in New Jersey and had appeared in a Menendez campaign advertizing. Another site attempted to advance the story by pointing out that Menendez's adult daughter was a political strategist and HuffPost Alive host: "His daughter's past views and writings on sexuality and gender issues are in disharmonize with the senator's deportment in the Dominican Republic."
The MSM is just as cynical of the conservative narrative, and skeptical. After all, what reporter doesn't want to ruin a politician, any politician, by digging out a scandal? The reporters who wrote this week's Washington Postal service and ABC News stories on Menendez previously bankrupt news on Solyndra and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, respectively.
Conservatives are confounded by today'due south stories, but non convinced. The killer docs are "affidavits obtained by The Washington Postal service." Did the paper get them at a press conference conducted by a cousin of Salomon Melgen? No—I'one thousand told that the paper got them independently, but I had to ask. Matthew Boyle, the reporter who wrote the first Daily Caller stories on Menendez writes that the Washington Post "got the wrong daughter." A Breitbart.com particular catches the Post tweaking the story to remove a reference to the Daily Caller and add together the reference to the cousin—all "arguably relevant to the question of whether the new story is credible." Notwithstanding right over at that place is ABC News, explaining that the recanting prostitute was offered to them, and to yjr DC, by Republican sources.
Who'south gotten the best of this story? The Daily Caller walks away with something. Even if its original story disintegrates, we're left with the insane tale of a midlevel Bond villain attempting to frame a U.Due south. senator in strange courts. An amateur media critic might wag his finger at David Martosko, who picked upwards the DC'south story after Boyle switched jobs. But at the end of February, Martosko announced a move to the Daily Mail, the tabloid that'south become "the biggest newspaper in the world." The undernews e'er wins.
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/03/menendezs-dominican-prostitute-scandal-have-the-allegations-collapsed.html
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