Stupid headline. Literally everyone who reads it is going to think the gold bars in Menendez' possession were stolen property, but they're not and that's not the point of the story at all.

TL;DR: In 2013 thieves stole 22 gold bars from the guy that bribed Menendez. Because he's rich, the cops actually solved the crime and returned the property and, here's the actual important bit: Fred Daibes, the guy that bribed Menendez, signed a release form specifying that the stamped, numbered gold bars were his. Now Menendez has some of them and that provenance makes it a lot easier to show where he got them.

This is some wild west shit. Gold bars! Literal gold bars like some kind of cartoon villain.

Look at his face. Is this really the face of someone who would take bribes? Who doesn’t have gold bars in his basement should throw the first stone.

Taking bribes in stolen, easily-traceable gold? I'm almost surprised they didn't come from a Swiss vault and had swastikas stamped on them...

Corruption?

Role in Congress suspended until proven innocent. We’ll still have enough unexposed criminals working the grift, one in the penalty box won’t matter.

I really wanted the robbery to be of Fort Knox or at least a huge bank vault. You know, to match how cartoonishly corrupt this bastard is..

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A decade later, it said, the FBI found four gold bars with unique serial numbers in the Clifton, New Jersey, home of Menendez and his wife, Nadine.

For example, a Swiss Bank Corp. gold bar with serial number 590005 that the FBI said it seized from Menendez’s home in a search this year had also been reported stolen by Daibes — and returned to him — a decade earlier.

“All of this spells bad news for Sen. Menendez, because the chain of custody — it appears — is going to be really easy to prove up,” NBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos said.

In a statement about the ties of the gold bars found at his home to a decade-old robbery, counsel for Menendez said he “will not be commenting on anonymous media leaks designed to prejudice his right to a fair trial.

In exchange, investigators alleged, Menendez used his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help Hana win an exclusive halal meat inspection contract with the Egyptian government.

As for Daibes’ separate bank fraud case, a federal judge in New Jersey threw out a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to one count and faced a sentence of probation after the new bribery charges came to light.

The original article contains 861 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Little shit should get extra time for embarrassing the Dems, whose only alternative is, uh… a total wannabe dictator who’d usher in fascism just because it keeps his base happy. So yeah. Thanks a fucking lot.