In July, Robert Menendez of New Jersey earned the ignominious distinction of becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of having acted as a foreign agent.
The federal indictment levied against him alleged that Menendez, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle and “other things of value” in exchange for using his influence to do Egypt’s bidding in Washington. Casey Michel’s lively new book, “Foreign Agents,” unravels the incentives and temptations that have led so many leading American figures to lobby on behalf of foreign governments that plainly do not uphold American values. Menendez does not appear in this story until the afterword, but plenty of other well-known figures — Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose foundation’s donors Michel alleges are “a roster of the world’s most reprehensible regimes”; Rudy Giuliani; and a plethora of blowhards and hacks cosplaying statesmen during the Trump administration (including Michael Flynn and Ric Grenell, whom Michel accurately nails as a “buffoonish troll”) — accept compensation, as the senior senator from New Jersey did, while helping foreign governments get something from ours.
Most have just been more clever than Menendez, who, according to federal prosecutors, stuffed cash into the pock.