re: #22 lawhawk

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.

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:

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.

Let’s leads us into the Daily Caller being caught in the “incompetent, or criminal; choose one” dilemma. Either criminal in trying to set up a smear job, or being totally incompetent as journalists and getting completely played by someone else into heavily taking part in a smear job.

If I recall correctly most parties caught in this trap either choose incompetent, or the third approach, “bluster and hope it goes away”.