I’m shocked. Shocked that the Daily Caller could have put hookers up to lying about Menendez. /

There are any number of entities and groups that might have been motivated to smear Menendez, the Daily Caller included. But the WaPo is pointing this squarely at the Daily Caller.

And it’s not surprising that the Daily Caller is busy spinning that Figueroa is being pressured into claiming that the Daily Caller paid him off to get the hooker claims going.

Earlier this week, Dominican police said three women were paid to lie about having sex for money with Menendez and a close friend. The police cited statements from the women and other evidence.

National police spokesman Maximo Baez Aybar told a news conference Monday that authorities had determined the women were paid hundreds of dollars by a local lawyer to make the false claims in videotaped interviews. The women said the lawyer coached them on what to say in their recorded statements, taped in a Dominican shopping mall in La Romana province. The women each said they were paid between $291 and $413 to say that they were paid them for while the senator vacationed in the Dominican Republic with Melgen. Each of the women told police they had never met either Menendez or Melgen.

For his part, Menendez is now calling for US prosecutors to go after who was behind the smear job. While the hooker scandal portion was always a smear job, Menendez does face real trouble relating to acting on behalf of Melgen. There were travel expenses that he reimbursed earlier this year (about $60k) because they would have violated the ethics rules.

The scandal may relate back to local politics:

The Daily Caller allegations were cited in a letter to the Senate’s ethics committee seeking an investigation that was written by, state Sen. Sam Thompson, R-Middlesex, a New Jersey political ally of Menendez’s opponent in November.

In an interview in Trenton on Monday, Thompson stood by his complaint about the flights, even as he claimed it did not mention prostitutes.

“I have no knowledge of anything about the women involved in prostitution. I did not make any allegations on them,” Thompson said. “My complaint was that we had valid indications he had taken these flights he had not reported them, he had not requested approval.”

The first paragraph of Thompson’s Nov. 3 letter, however, accuses Menendez of violating codes of conduct by taking the flights and “soliciting prostitution.”

The second paragraph includes this sentence: “If Senator Menendez solicited prostitution while a member of the United State Senate, this conduct would be reprehensible.”

Thompson is also Republican chairman of Middlesex County and for many years served as an assemblyman in the same district as state Sen. Joseph Kyrillos, R-Monmouth, who ran against Menendez last year.

Kyrillos got crushed last November, and the Thompson letter to the Senate Ethics Committee may have been part of payback for that loss.

It still doesn’t address who was behind the money but as most people are fond of saying, you’ve got to follow the money where it leads. And it may be that the Daily Caller was trying to gin up a controversy, or they themselves were used to attack Menendez.