According to the indictment, from 2018 until at least 2022, Senator Menendez allegedly used his position as the chair and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to secretly aid the Egyptian government "With respect to foreign military sales and foreign military financing." He also pressured officials at the Department of Agriculture to grant monopoly privileges to his wife's longtime friend, Wael Hana, a New Jersey businessman with ties to the Egyptian government.
To Menendez's point, there is nothing abnormal about a foreign government spending money to influence an American policymaker.
According to Open Secrets, since 2016 thousands of foreign agents and lobbyists have registered with the Department of Justice to lobby on behalf of foreign governments.
The number of registered foreign agents and their reported spending underrepresents the extent of foreign lobbying and bribery.
As Ben Freeman and Eli Clifton of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft have demonstrated over and over again, foreign governments fund many top Washington think tanks-a way to influence American policymakers that often goes undisclosed.
The widespread nature of foreign payoffs in Washington, DC, should not be taken as a defense of Senator Menendez but as evidence that exchanging political favors for cash is much more common than the occasional scandal would have us believe.
For foreign governments like Egypt, the political privilege for sale is access to the largest, most powerful military in history and the arms industry that props it up.
https://mises.org/wire/menendez-indictments-understanding-business-usual-washington
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