To point it out on the first day of Sen. Bob Menendez's corruption trial, Jon Stewart took the opportunity during Monday's episode Daily show to point out how painfully unnecessary the whole thing was and joked that the whole thing could have been avoided if the senator had been properly trained in “legal corruption.”
Last September, Menendez was indicted along with his wife Nadine Menendez for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for the senator's influence. Stewart reviewed the alleged crimes in the case, including allegations that the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had accepted gold bars, $480,000 in cash, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and other bribes from businessmen connected to the governments of Egypt and Catarrh
The clip continued to be reported The New York time's reports that Menendez's lawyers cited his past “traumatic” experiences as the reason behind his cash stash. “These are just the gold bars with my emotional support,” Stewart joked in an impression of the senator. “Whenever I'm not with them, I stress and support the drama in different ways.”
Stewart continued, “But perhaps the dumbest thing about this whole, not-so-believable episode of 'Real Housewives,' is how unnecessary it all is.”
“You, sir, are an elected official in America's most respected legislature. It's like a license to print money. You don't have to break the law so comically when legal corruption in the Senate is so fucking lucrative,” the host said, before introducing the final segment of the show and asking: “Senator Robert Menendez, 'How dumb are you?'
After calling Menendez's alleged attempts to promise “favors to foreign entities for a little change on the side” mere “bush-league,” Stewart outlined all the other ways he could have taken financial advantage of his position in government. The Daily show The host went to the senator's school of insider trading, taking “luxury lobbying vacations” and writing laws that benefit a side business, “like how Sen. Chuck Grassley made $370,000 in farm subsidies.”
As he finished the monologue, Stewart had one final question: “Robert Menendez's gold bars in exchange for favorable legislation are obviously cartoonishly corrupt, but for anyone out there who believes that the status quo of government support and influence is of a completely different kind than Menendez … How dumb are you?”
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