Menendez is guilty and Christie is history; Trump sets record for lies in his first year

In these photos from Getty Images, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, left, and his friend, Dr. Salomon Melgen, were tried in federal court in Newark, but the judge declared a mistrial after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked on the 18 counts against them.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The most famous case of jury nullification likely was the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson despite all of the evidence against him in the brutal double murders of his estranged wife and her friend.

And on Thursday in Newark, 10 out of 12 members of  a federal jury reportedly were determined to vote "not guilty" on the corruption charges against Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., before the judge declared a mistrial.

I feel Menendez is guilty of having an unspoken corrupt arrangement with his friend and co-defendant, Dr. Salomon Melgen, to trade gifts and political contributions for official favors.

That's why the senator tried to pressure Obama administration officials to drop charges against the eye doctor in an $8.9 million Medicare billing dispute.

Pay to play

If you live in New Jersey, you're familiar with "pay to play," especially as it is practiced in small towns and cities that fill jobs or award contracts to engineers, attorneys, consultants and others who contribute to council and school board candidates.

The arrangement between Menendez and Melgen was on a grander scale -- the eye doctor gave nearly $700,000 to entities that could help the senator get re-elected in 2012, as well as free flights on his private jet and a $4,934 stay at a Paris hotel.

During the Newark trial, most of the news outlets I followed, including The Record of Woodland Park, rarely mentioned that in April, Melgen was convicted in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., on 67 counts of defrauding Medicare out of as much as $105 million from 2008 to 2013.

The case was labeled one of the largest Medicare rip-offs ever, but Melgen's sentencing was postponed until December.

On his side

The Record has been on Menendez's side since he was indicted in April 2015 on bribery, fraud, making false statements and other charges.

And Friday's paper devoted nearly three full pages to the mistrial, including a so-called analysis on Page 1, a favorable editorial, and a column by Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin, who compared the jury deliberations to the Henry Fonda movie "Twelve Angry Men."

"...No one should count Bob Menendez out," the editorial concluded. "He's a fighter."

As if Friday's coverage wasn't enough, Editor Richard Green put a really long Mike Kelly column recapping the Menendez trial on Page 1 today.

Tackle it, and if you haven't been able to sleep lately, the column will knock you out immediately.

Although he was never formally charged, the court of public opinion convicted Governor Christie of masterminding lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in September 2013 to retaliate against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse Christie's re-election bid. The ensuing Bridgegate scandal derailed his White House campaign.

Christie 3-parter

I wasn't able to get through "The Christie Legacy," a tedious, 3-part retrospective of Governor Christie's two terms by Record political Columnist Charles Stile, once the governor's chief booster.

Shit. I barely read the headlines.

Stile wrote column after column polishing the GOP bully's image as a compromiser, and tried to be the first Trenton reporter to signal Christie's run for president (maybe the veteran reporter was hoping to become White House press secretary).

The sub-headline on the first part, which ran last Wednesday, said:

"OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED

 FOR A GIFTED POLITICIAN"

The final part on Friday listed his "successes and failures," but I didn't see a word about how Christie single-handedly destroyed mass transit, and cut NJ Transit's state subsidy by $300 million a year or 90%.

And did Stile spend any time on Christie's nearly 600 vetoes or threats of vetoes, which he used to control the Democratic majority in the state Legislature?

He put the kibosh on everything from a millionaire's tax surcharge to the $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The Record has made too little of how Christie's divisive, mean-spirited rule was a foreshadowing of what the nation is experiencing under President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress.

"Worst governor in New Jersey history" would have been an appropriate headline for Stile's three-parter.

HuffingtonPost.com reports many people are hilariously reimagining President Trump's awkwardly using two hands to drink from a water bottle, including this one of him kissing a framed photo of daughter Ivanka.

Fact Checker

Last week, The Washington Post's Fact Checker reported "our updated tally of President Trump's false/misleading claims [read 'lies']: 1,628 claims in 298 days."

"In the last 35 days, Trump has averaged an astonishing nine claims a day," said the newspaper, which has awarded numerous Pinocchios to the Liar-In-Chief.

"There are now at least 50 claims that he has repeated three or more times. The president's claim that 'Obamacare is failing' continues to top the list ... followed by his habit of taking credit for business decisions he didn't make. 

"Two claims about taxes are on the rise: that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in U.S. history and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations (both false).

"Ten months in, the president's tally stands at 1,628 false or misleading claims through Nov. 13. That's an average of 5.5 claims a day and puts him on track to reach 1,999 claims by the end of his first year in office, though he obviously would easily exceed 2,000, if maintained the pace of the past month."

I'm still waiting for a reporter from The Washington Post or any other news outlet to get up at a news conference and tell Trump:

"Mr. President, please stop lying to the American people."

Worst N.J. governor ever labors in the shadow of worst president in U.S. history

This undated photo of New Jersey Governor Christie and then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, right, ran with a June 14, 2016, post on VanityFair.com (credit: Brendan Smialowki/AFP/Getty Images).

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Governor Christie has worked hard to reshape an image tarnished by the Bridgegate scandal and more than 500 vetoes of everything from a millionaires tax to the $15 minimum wage.

In his crusade against drug abuse and overdose deaths from heroin and such pain relievers as oxycodone,  the GOP bully has been trying for a kinder and gentler image.

At the end of March, President Trump named Christie to lead a new national opioid commission to address what many call the deadliest public health crisis in modern American history.

"Addiction is a disease, and no life is disposable," Christie said in a TV interview. "We can help people by giving them appropriate treatment."

Trump's pal?

That appointment was the consolation prize for New Jersey's governor, who dropped out of the presidential race in January 2016 and threw his support to Trump -- drawing the ire of six major daily newspapers that called for his resignation.

He had been passed over as Trump's running mate in the Nov. 8 election, and the former corruption-busting U.S. attorney for New Jersey didn't even get nominated to be attorney general of the United States.

Also, he was ousted as head of Trump's transition team at the request of son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Christie prosecuted his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering in 2005, and served 14 months in federal prison.

In a June 2016 story, New Yorker magazine reported: 

 “Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.)” The servile depiction of Christie incited other media outlets to refer to the governor as the real-estate mogul’s “unpaid McDonald’s delivery intern” and “an errand boy for Donald Trump’s campaign.”

Christie crusade

Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park has been focusing on Christie's anti-drug crusade:

Today, State House Bureau reporter Dustin Racioppi says the state Attorney General's Office has joined a multi-state probe of the pharmaceutical industry "for its potential role in the opioid crisis that has swept the state and the country" (1A).

The office also issued a subpoena to Johnson & Johnson "related to marketing practices for opioids by subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals." 

"Drug overdoses, fueled mostly by heroin and other opioids, killed more than 52,000 people in 2015 -- more than the roughly 43,000 who died at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1995," Racioppi says.

Last year's drug-related death toll is expected to exceed 59,000, according to a New York Times analysis.

Stile v. Christie

On Wednesday, Record Editor Richard A. Green didn't even bother running a front-page news story on Christie announcing at a press conference that the state fined Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey $15.5 million for allegedly bungling thousands of claims.

Instead, Page 1 carried another in an endless succession of boring political columns from burned-out Trenton reporter Charles Stile, who has been trying mightily to make up for more than 6 years of idolizing Christie in print.

Stile's column reported the fine on the state's biggest health insurer, and noted Christie has been trying to "browbeat a reluctant Democratic State Legislature into backing a $300 million raid of Horizon's capital reserves to finance an expansion of the state's drug-treatment services."

The news story ran on A4.

Still in Palookaville

The outcome of the Christie-Horizon battle remains to be seen. 

But the governor has an unlimited number of vetoes he can execute before he leaves office next January or at least use as leverage over the Democratic majority in the state Legislature.

He also has the lowest approval rating of any governor in the country.

And New Jersey's worst governor ever still labors in the shadow of the worst president in U.S. history.

Syrian refugee

Page 1 today carries not one but three pieces on successful students and their graduations.

Staff Writer Hannan Adely's portrait of Mohamad Chacha of Paterson caught my eye, because he and his family fled Aleppo, Syria, "with just the clothes on their backs and their passports" (1A).

Not quite, as we learn later in the story.

And Adely doesn't mention that after the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, Christie sought to bar all Syrian refugees -- even children -- from entering New Jersey and the rest of the country.

Luckily, the Chacha family of 6 arrived in fall 2013 "at a time before refugee bans even entered the national conversation," Adely says in a clear reference to Trump's executive orders, all of which have been overturned by the courts.

The family had obtained visas to Cuba, where they lived for 15 months, including interviews and background checks, before being allowed to enter the United States.

Cuba? What a coincidence, especially if Mohamad's last name, Chacha, is written as "Cha Cha,"  the Latin dance that originated on the Caribbean's largest island.