Gold Bar Bob Menendez Is Guilty

By: Matthew Russell Lee

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Bob Menendez as his nine-week second trial went on got more vocal, on the walk from the courthouse door to his waiting black car, with its New Jersey license plates. We are shredding their case, he said near the end. He explained his decision not to testify by saying the government had not proved every element of their case. But hadn't they proved some? Bob was gone, headed east on Worth Street toward Chinatown's Kim Lau Square.

Kurt Wheelock after live tweeting each trial day went down onto Worth Street to try to ask Bob question. He asked him about the Biden - Trump debate - "I'll definitely be watching it," Bob quipped - and about the 45-year sentence imposed mid-trial on Honduras' former president Juan Orlando Hernandez (no comment). He tried to ask Bob about UNRWA, but by then the crowd had grown too large.

When Kurt Wheelock had still been in the UN, before they threw him out, he reported on bribes given by Qatar. Some were in plain sight - a garish golden lounge on the first floor looking at the East River, a grant to digitize UN record water-logged from Super Storm Sandy. But some went directly to the top. And it was soon after Kurt yelled after Qatar's Al Jazeera's crew and Antonio Guterres' spokesman, about their private briefing, that he was told things were going to get worse for him. A week later they frog-marched him out onto first avenue with guns; soon he would be banned from the UN for life.
Now here he was in the SDNY courthouse, covering Qatar's bribes to US Senator Menendez, former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bob was no longer traveling to DC to cast his Senate votes. But Kurt still watched the UN noon press briefing, e-mailing in questions they now never answered.

Qatar's Al Jazeera had covered Menendez' case when it was first indicted, only as to Egypt. When Qatar was added, they dropped it. More reporters came from the UN to cover an arraignment for a murder for hire of a Sikh independence activist than for the trial of the former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Bob would plan out a single sound byte, and deliver it before getting in the car. "I have faith in God and I have faith in the jury," Bob said after the first day of deliberations.

But on the third day, "Bob" says:
As the guilty verdicts fell
From the forewoman's lips
I just looked at them-
How could they?
Judge Stein racked us up for sentencing
Forty-five minutes each on October 29
That's when I should be winning
Another six-year term.
Nadine has no trial date
I don't know how I'm polling
I see the Orange Man getting off -
Why not me?
This is not over