Media continues to give Menendez cover in prostitution, ethics violation scandal

State Senator Sam Thompson, as Chairman of the Middlesex GOP, files an ethics complaint against US Senator Bob Menendez

Media ignores the whole affair

In case you missed it while the lights were out, Senator Bob Menendez has been accused of accepting luxury travel to and lodging in the Dominican Republic where he participated in sex parties with prostitutes and short changed his concubines from their agreed upon fees.

Menendez responded by calling the accusations, which were first reported by the conservative website Daily Caller, “a product of the right wing smear machine.”

However, the far left wing website, Gawker, followed Daily Caller’s story with a report from “someone who was unfortunate enough to live in the unit below Menendez’s Washington, DC apartment,” who said “he would bring home a different young, attractive lady almost every night, put on a little jazz, and f**k loudly until 3 a.m.”

“We lived below him,” the former neighbor told Gawker (according to public records databases, both Menendez and the former neighbor used to share an address in Northeast DC). “It was outrageous. When it started, we thought it was a one-time thing. But it went on for months-hours and hours of headbanging sex.”

When the Senate was in session, the former neighbor said, Menendez would usually stay at the DC apartment on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings-on weekends, Mondays, and Fridays, he would go back to his New Jersey home. Of those three weeknights, the neighbor said, Menendez usually spent at least two with a constantly rotating gallery of attractive, young, and loud women.

“They’d usually arrive together in the late evening,” the neighbor said. “We’d hear him put some jazz on. Maybe around 11 p.m., the noise would start. He had a very squeaky mattress and a very squeaky bed frame. We’d hear moaning, and we could hear them switching positions because different parts of the bed would squeak. It was awful.”

Without fail, the neighbor said, these women would leave Menendez’s apartment at 3 a.m. and get in a cab. “My wife would be up because of the noise, and she’d watch them out the window,” the neighbor said. “They were always in like four-inch heels, and it was definitely a different one every time. Different women on back-to-back nights. These were very young, very attractive women.”

State Senator Sam Thompson, as Chairman of the Middlesex County Republican Organization, wrote the Senate Ethics Committee on November 3, alleging that Menendez violated federal law and Senate ethics rules by accepting free travel and lodging from a campaign donor and failing to report it in his financial disclosures.

In his request for an ethics investigation into Menendez, Thompson did not accuse the US Senator of breaking any laws regarding prostitution, likely because it is legal in the Dominican Republic.  Thompson told MMM that he was unaware of  Gawker’s report when he filed the complaint.  The Gawker report implies that Menendez violated solicitation laws in the District of Columbia, unless of course the senator has a rock star like ability to charm ” a different young, attractive lady” into his bed “almost every night” until 3 a.m. without paying for their services.

The national and New Jersey mainstream media are so far giving Menendez a free pass on the allegations.

CNN’s Candy Crowley, the woman who teamed up with President Obama against Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate, asked Menendez to comment on the sex scandal that caused General David Petraeous to resign as CIA Director, but did not bring up the allegations against the senator when he appeared on State of the Union on Sunday.

Today, The Star Ledger reports that Sen. Menendez returns to Washington on the rise to become the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee should Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee join the Obama Administration.  Kerry has been rumored to be in line to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.  There is no mention of Thompson’s ethics complaint or the Daily Caller and Gawker reports in The Star Ledger.