Dem
51
GOP
49
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has been indicted for being an all-around crook and unregistered foreign agent. This is the second time he has been indicted. The first time he got off due to a hung jury. He didn't learn anything from that episode and continued his wicked ways. Back in October, the judge in the current case, Sidney Stein, set the trial date as May 6, 2024. A few weeks ago, Menendez asked for a 2-month delay because he said that he was expecting to get 735 terabytes of data as a result of the discovery process. A terabyte is 1024 gigabytes. If you want all the gory details, a terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. Today's blog is about 49,000 bytes. If we continued to post blogs of this size every day, it would take 61,476 years to reach 1 TB. And 735 TB would take us to 45.2 million years. Now imagine you are Menendez' lawyer and have to read all that stuff.
What difference does 2 months make? Well, the New Jersey primary is June 4. Menendez hasn't said yet whether he will run for reelection but he already has two strong challengers: Tammy Murphy, wife of the sitting New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, and Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ). If the trial is held as scheduled on May 6, all the evidence against Menendez will be presented just before the primary and he might even be a convicted felon by Primary Day. He would thus prefer the trial to start after the primary.
However, when the data came in, it was only 3 terabytes, not 735 terabytes. Last week, the judge ruled that a mere 3 terabytes (6.7 million documents) did not justify changing the trial date, especially since it is 100x less than Menendez was expecting.
The judge's decision now puts Menendez on the spot. Does he really want to run in the primary against two solid opponents when he will be on trial the month before the election? The voters might then just conclude that something is rotten in the state of Egypt (whose government Menendez is charged with working for as an unregistered foreign agent). We expect with the trial now definitely set before the primary, Menendez won't file and will spend all his time trying to stay out of prison. This will probably turn the Senate primary into a two-way contest between Murphy and Kim. (V)