Bob Menendez’s Biggest Campaign Expense Isn’t Even for Campaigning

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez may be indicted for allegedly taking envelopes of cash and gold bars from local businessmen in exchange for favors with foreign officials, but that doesn’t mean he’s finished living the high life.

Instead, Menendez is reportedly spending thousands of dollars of campaign donations at Morton’s Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., “where the filet mignon starts at $56 and the tomahawks top out at $139,” according to The Daily Beast.

The campaign—which has only managed to raise a little more than $95,000 this year—has so far spent $7,012.51 at the steakhouse, paying the bill via Menendez’s New Millennium political action committee. Menendez’s committees also spent $1,489.22 at three New Jersey restaurants in January, $1,500 for catering from Italian standby Carmine’s, and $464.24 at an exclusive club near Capitol Hill, reported the Beast.

And Menendez can continue to have his donors foot the bill for as long as he wants. The disgraced Garden State politician can keep spending so long as he can claim that the meals were meetings, even if he ends up blowing every penny and then some, according to a campaign finance lawyer who spoke with the publication. Brett Kappel of the firm Harmon Curran noted that the “candidate is not personally liable for the debts of the campaign.”

And there’s even precedent for Menendez to do the same with his attorneys: The embattled politico could effectively rinse his hands of his legal bills by reporting the fees as outstanding campaign debt, since the criminal charges are “arising out of his status as a federal officeholder.”

“He could theoretically list them as campaign debts and never pay them, just file FEC reports every four months,” Kappel told the Beast. “The actual deadline is when the lawyers refuse to do any more work, because they need to get paid.”

Still, the campaign has quite a bit more cash to chew through—roughly $3.5 million—before it’s in jeopardy.

The New Jersey Democrat and his wife stand accused of acting as foreign agents for Egypt, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of flashy gifts in exchange for Menendez’s “power and influence to protect and enrich” the businessmen and government of Egypt. In a superseding indictment filed in January, Menendez was also accused of other corruption-related charges, including allegedly taking bribes from Qatar in an attempt to help a New Jersey real estate developer secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company tied to the Middle Eastern country and collecting lavish gifts in exchange for his handiwork. Menendez and his wife have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Just a reminder to those who forgot: Donald Trump doesn’t care for the nation’s veterans, and he never did.

A montage of the notorious draft dodger’s old musings on the military went viral on Memorial Day. The audio medley, assembled by The Daily Show, featured the voices of several network anchors reporting on just how little the presumptive GOP presidential nominee actually cares about the military, from leveraging charity funds intended for the military to prop up his 2020 presidential campaign to deriding people who sacrifice their lives for their country as “suckers” and “losers.”

In one clip from 2015, Trump claimed that late Senator John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

“I like people that weren’t captured, OK?” Trump said.

In another snippet taken from Trump’s presidency, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reported that Trump opted to play golf rather than reaching out to the families of U.S. soldiers who were left behind and killed during a controversial ambush in Niger.

“Trump has faced major criticism for not reaching out to the families of four U.S. soldiers,” Ruhle said. “He has played golf at least four times since these young men were killed.”

Trump was later caught on tape laughing while recalling the incident to White House aides, and caught more flack after he fumbled the name of one of the soldiers’ widows when he finally got on the phone with her.

“I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name, and that’s what hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?” Myeshia Johnson, the wife of late Army Sergeant La David Johnson, told ABC News weeks after the ambush.

Donald Trump revealed new details of his horrific massive deportation plan at the Libertarian National Convention on Monday, where he was mostly booed by the crowd, saying he wants to grant cops who carry out mass deportation total immunity from misconduct investigations and lawsuits.

Alt-right podcaster and beanie enthusiast Tim Pool interviewed Trump—because the Libertarian National Convention is nothing if not a fever dream—asking him, “I know that you’ve said there’s gonna be the largest deportation effort in your next term. How do we do it?”

Trump rambled, as he does, about an estimated 15 to 17 million people he wants to deport—numbers that contradict existing data and that he seems to have just made up—who’ve entered the United States for asylum and job opportunities, baselessly accusing them of being “murderers … drug dealers … coming from mental institutions,” before finally saying he wants to use “local police” to enforce his mass deportation plans.

“It will really be done with local police,” said Trump before devolving into a barely coherent tirade explaining his desire to provide immunity to his future deportation gestapo:

Do you know, the respect has been taken away, the honor has been taken away from our police forces. They’re not allowed to do anything, and whether it’s libertarian or not libertarian, people have to have, you have to have law and order. You can’t have 500 people walking into a department store and just walking out with everything they have, and we have to give honor and respect back, and I believe immunity because, you know, so often when a police person does their job they end up with no pension, they end up with no house, they end up with no family. Everything’s taken away from them. They have to get their own lawyer. So we’re gonna give them back their dignity and their strength.

Trump’s depiction of police accountability is an extremely exaggerated detailing of what could happen when someone with a cushy job loses that job for engaging in egregious violations of the law. His desire to shield cops from accountability builds on existing qualified immunity policies, which shield cops from being held personally liable for violating someone’s constitutional rights without a high-bar precedent. Under these policies, someone else in the same position has to have violated a person’s constitutional rights in the same way and have been held accountable for that violation—an intensely confusing policy that essentially functions to severely limit people’s ability to pursue misconduct lawsuits against cops who violate their constitutional rights.

Donald Trump keeps giving E. Jean Carroll grounds for another lawsuit, and the magazine writer says she might take action.

On Memorial Day, May 27, the former president made an unhinged and disrespectful Truth Social post where the holiday came second to his personal grievances.

“Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for ‘DEFAMATION,’” Trump wrote.

In a follow-up post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday afternoon, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted the response from Carroll’s lawyer.

In May 2023, Trump was found liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and of defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later. A New York jury awarded her $2 million in damages for the sexual and physical abuse and recommended she be awarded an additional $3 million for defamation. In January this year, after Trump continued to insult her, Carroll was awarded an additional total of $83.3 million, including $7.3 million for damage to her reputation, $11 million for emotional harm, and $65 million for punitive damages. Trump tried to appeal the last ruling, but was rebuffed.

As Trump faces a third potential lawsuit from Carroll, he is also dealing with his trial in New York over a hush-money scheme in which he allegedly paid off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair with the help of his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. He faces 34 felony counts in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Closing arguments began Tuesday.

Donald Trump had a special Memorial Day message for the people who oversaw his recent legal battles, using the military holiday as an opportunity to slam the judges, victims, and judgments of his three recent cases and practically daring writer E. Jean Carroll to sue him again.

“Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for ‘DEFAMATION,’” Trump posted on Truth Social, referring to Carroll, who won a defamation case against Trump in January for similar comments. A previous trial in May 2023 found Trump sexually abused Carroll—providing grounds for a partial summary ruling against him for repeatedly claiming that he never knew or touched her.

“She didn’t know when the so-called event took place—sometime in the 1990’s—never filed a police report, didn’t have to produce the ‘dress’ that she threatened me with (it showed negative!), & sung my praises in the first half of her CNN Interview with Alison Cooper, but changed her tune in the second half—Gee, I wonder why (UNDER APPEAL!)? The Rape charge was dropped by a jury!” Trump continued, really sticking it to CNN and definitely not playing schoolhouse games in choosing to misname its lead anchor, Anderson Cooper.

But Carroll wasn’t the only legal battle on Trump’s mind: The GOP presidential nominee is still furious about his last New York trial, which cost him nearly half a billion dollars and blocked him and his two eldest sons from operating businesses within the Empire State.

“Arthur Engoron, the N.Y. State Wacko Judge who fined me almost 500 Million Dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for DOING NOTHING WRONG, used a Statute that has never been used before, gave me NO JURY, Mar-a-Lago at $18,000,000,” Trump wrote, misrepresenting the details of a case that found him to have routinely misrepresented his financial details in order to secure better business loans. And Trump can only thank his own legal decisions for how the trial operated (or for being there in the first place). His attorneys did not ask for a jury in a trial that Engoron would later say did not require one.

“Now for Merchan!” Trump concluded the rant.

Somehow, that wasn’t the only Trump to share a tone-deaf message over the holiday weekend. His second son, Eric, issued his own strange note on Friday, retweeting another user’s post of a picture of the Trump family, captioned, “The family that gave up everything to Save America. Thank You!”

“And we will do it again!” wrote Eric Trump.