Actually, Sen. Menendez, what you did does indeed sound pretty corrupt

When Sen. Bob Menendez’s lawyers finally began arguing his case to a jury last week, they did their best to make his conduct sound innocuous.

Their problem is New Jersey politicians have so normalized their often-egregious behavior, they don’t appear to recognize when they’re describing corrupt acts. The Overton Window on unethical conduct in the Garden State hasn’t been shifted; it’s been smashed into pieces.

Take the events surrounding Menendez’s search for a U.S. attorney for New Jersey. When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race, the search was on for a new person to become the state’s chief federal law enforcement officer, and Menendez was tasked with finding one.

(Yes, one person — if they belong to the same party as the person occupying the White House — essentially gets to hand-pick our U.S. attorney. That’s how the system operates, and it’s barely questioned, so we’re starting at a base level of sorta corrupt.)

Menendez reached out to attorney Philip Sellinger about the gig and asked him about an active U.S. Attorney’s Office case involving Fred Daibes, a real estate developer and Menendez pal who was charged with bank fraud.

Prosecutors told jurors that Menendez used this interaction to tell Sellinger “he hoped the candidate would look into Daibes’ case if the candidate became the U.S. attorney.” The message from Menendez to Sellinger, prosecutors say, was clear: You’ll get the job if you agree to make my friend’s charges disappear.

Sounds bad! Menendez’s own version of events, via his lawyer Avi Weitzman, is that Menendez merely mentioned to Sellinger that he thought Sellinger was biased against Daibes because of an unrelated legal matter between Sellinger’s firm and Daibes.

“You’ll see clear evidence that the senator just wants to make sure that the U.S. Attorney’s Office gave Fred Daibes due process, the exact same thing that prosecutors all over the land are required to give their defendants. Does that sound like someone putting a thumb on the scale of justice?” attorney Avi Weitzman told the jury Wednesday.

Yeah, actually, it does! Menendez has nearly total power over getting Sellinger named to a prestigious job, and during the job interview, Menendez — by his own admission — said, soooooo whaddya think of this case that involves a close personal friend of mine? That very much sounds like him trying to put his thumb on the scales of justice. Add in that Sellinger was at Menendez’s wedding, and you have to wonder why Menendez was even talking to him about the U.S. attorney job in the first place.

I talked to Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at Campaign Legal Center, who noted that in recent years, politicians have engaged in behavior that not so long ago would have forced them to resign. He cited George Santos, the former New York congressman who was the subject of a 23-count federal indictment and a House ethics report that found “substantial evidence” he had broken federal law — but still had to be expelled from the House in December when he didn’t heed calls to resign.

“Elected officials seem to no longer be ashamed of appearing corrupt, which then goes to not being ashamed of actually being corrupt,” Payne said.

Now, the question for the Menendez jurors is whether all this is illegal. I have some doubts about whether prosecutors can prove it, not just to the 12 jurors who will decide Menendez’s fate, but also to the U.S. Supreme Court, which loves overturning public corruption convictions. In Justice Elena Kagan’s decision reversing the Bridgegate convictions, Kagan famously wrote that “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.”

Maybe so. But every corrupt act is, in fact, corrupt.