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On 29 Nov 2023, Igor Lavrov <patriot1@protonmail.com> posted some news:uk7bd3$r9q3$2@dont-email.me:

Nadine Arslanian is a common leftist whore.

Embattled Sen. Bob Menendez is facing a new perfect storm of legal and political troubles — splitting from the super-lawyer defending him against charges of bribery, facing speculation that one of his co-accused’s
closest associates could be ratting him out to federal prosecutors, and
seeing his polls plummet.

The New Jersey Democrat quietly split from his longtime powerhouse lawyer
Abbe Lowell — who secured his acquittal on previous bribery charges — and instead signed up with Washington-based attorney Robert Luskin.

Ironically for an indictee fighting charges that he took bribes in gold
bars, Luskin himself was once paid in gold bars by another client —
earning him the nickname “Gold Bar Bob,” the same as the senator’s.

Menendez, 69, who has been in the political arena for half a century and a member of the US Senate since 2006, is facing record low poll numbers,
with 70 percent of Garden State voters saying he should resign.

The Democrat’s latest troubles began in June 2022, when federal agents
raided his Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home and found gold bars, as well as
hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed into the pockets of
Menendez’s jackets.

Menendez, his second wife, Nadine Arslanian, and three associates — one of
them a developer called Fred Daibes — were indicted in October on charges
of bribery and conspiring to act as foreign agents for Egypt. All five
deny all charges.

Now The Post can disclose that one of Daibes’ former business partners,
who was also a Menendez donor, has been cooperating with Manhattan
prosecutors since February 2022, four months before the raid.

Gazmend Lita, an Albanian American, quietly cut a plea deal that month, agreeing to cooperate with the prosecutors on undisclosed investigations
while pleading guilty to one count of being part of an illegal gambling
ring, according to court documents.

In return he got three years’ probation and agreed to forfeit more than $111,000 for his crimes, according to federal court records — compared to
the five-year sentence he could have faced.

But Lita — who once posed with Joe Biden long before his time in the White House — is closely entwined with Daibes, who in turn is accused of bribing Menendez.

The 53-year-old Albanian American co-owned Le Jardin restaurant in
Edgewater with Daibes, while his Lita Bros. Construction has offices in
the same Edgewater corporate building that houses Daibes’ own construction firm.

He also lives in an apartment at a luxury riverfront residential tower,
The Alexander, developed by Daibes.

And Lita was also a member of the board of the Indian branch of IS EG
Halal, a halal certification company at the center of the Menendez
indictment. he left the board in Jan. 2021.

The New Jersey-based firm is run by Egyptian American Wael Hana, who is
also indicted in the Menendez bribery case. He too denies all charges.

Prosecutors allege that Hana was introduced by Arslanian to Menendez in
2020, before the couple married.

Wael’s company, which is also run out of Daibes’ Edgewater office
building, was operated with financial backing from Daibes, according to
court records.

Lita has his own ties to Menendez. He and his family members have donated $11,000 to Menendez’s campaigns for Senate.

And Lita lobbied the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2019 — when
Menendez was the ranking Democratic member — on behalf of an Albanian prosecutor who had been banned from entering the US, according to Open
Secrets.

A New Jersey attorney for Lita did not return The Post’s request for
comment Thursday.

For his part, Menendez has close ties to the Albanian American community,
with one newspaper pronouncing him “The Voice of American Reason and
Justice” for his commitment to urging Serbia to recognize the independence
of Kosovo, its former southern province which has an Albanian ethnic
majority.

Menendez and Arslanian attended events sponsored by the Albanian American
Civic League, which has lobbied Menendez when he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He stepped down after the first federal
indictment accusing him of bribery in September.

However, he has rebuffed demands from his Democratic Senate colleagues and
some of New Jersey’s most powerful party members, including Gov. Phil
Murphy, to resign entirely. Murphy’s wife, Tammy, has announced she will
run against Menendez in the 2024 Democratic primary for his seat.

In October, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 80 percent of Republicans favor the senator stepping down, along with 71 percent of
Democrats and 67 percent of independent voters. Only 16 percent said he
should remain in office. Menendez has said he will not resign.

He is facing a political and legal fight without Lowell, the bare-knuckled brawler Washington power lawyer who also represents Hunter Biden, by his
side.

On Nov. 16, two lawyers working for the Chicago-based law firm that
includes Lowell withdrew from Menendez’s case, court documents say.

No explanation was given for Lowell’s withdrawal. Lowell did not return
The Post’s request for comment this week, and Luskin refused comment
Wednesday.

But Lowell had guided Menendez’s defense when he stood trial in Newark
federal court in 2017 on charges of conspiracy, bribery, honest services
fraud and false statements over alleged payments from a Medicare
fraudster. That ended with a hung jury and prosecutors chose not retry the senator.

Now Luskin will represent him when he appears next in federal court in Manhattan. His wife has her own legal team.

Luskin, 73, was himself once paid with 45 gold bars by a precious metals
dealer who was convicted of laundering money for Colombian drug cartels.

The Harvard graduate earned the moniker “Gold Bar Bob” after accepting a $500,000 legal payment while appealing the 1993 conviction of Stephen Saccoccia, a Rhode Island precious metals dealer who laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s.

Saccoccia was slapped with a 660-year prison sentence, while in 1998
Luskin agreed to forfeit $245,000 in his fees to settle a case brought by federal prosecutors against him.

“While I settled with the government, with absolutely no admission of
liability or wrongdoing, my colleagues fought the government efforts and
the U.S. Court of Appeals twice ruled that the government was not entitled
to forfeit these assets,” Luskin told The Post last week.

Luskin, who owns homes in Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard, also represented Lance Armstrong in the disgraced cyclist’s doping case, as
well as a host of White House insiders of both parties.

They include President George W. Bush’s polling guru Karl Rove, and Mark Middleton, a former aide to President Bill Clinton with ties to
billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Middleton committed suicide at his
home in Arkansas last year

In addition to Luskin, Menendez will be represented by Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, who represented then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in an
independent investigation of the Bridgegate affair.

The 2013-14 scandal saw appointees of Christie conspire to create traffic
jams in Fort Lee, NJ, by shutting down lanes on the George Washington
Bridge as political payback.

Janet
1 December, 2023

Newark federal court in 2017 on charges of conspiracy, bribery, honest
services fraud and false statements over alleged payments from a Medicare fraudster. That ended with a hung jury and prosecutors chose not retry
him.

Best yet, NJ reelected him.

Jason MacBride
1 December, 2023

Note to the gold digging wife: there's nothing wrong with being 56, unless
you dress like you're 14.

James Kilbourne
1 December, 2023

Her blue jeans are real classy.

Shem18
1 December, 2023

Please. These creeps go after the 14 yos all the time, and nothing
happens.

Jeff Epstein and his associated billionaires, politicians, etc.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/01/news/sen-bob-menendez-splits-from- superlawyer-and-may-have-rat/

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