In addition to revealing on Friday impending federal criminal corruption charges against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a CNN report also revealed that the lawmaker applies a double standard to himself on privacy matters.
While the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee dismissed concerns about civil liberties and due process after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency conducts deep-penetrating warrantless surveillance programs at home and abroad, Menendez has, in his own case, attempted to avail himself of a privacy protection available only to United States Senators and Representatives.
In responding to the federal probe into allegations of his graft—accusations that surround favors the senator is alleged to have performed for a donor whose fortune is tied to Medicaid—Menendez has claimed that emails and testimony from current and former staffers are protected from prosecutors’ scrutiny by the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution.
The provision grants US lawmakers the right to “be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same,” and freedom from interrogation concerning “any Speech or Debate in either House.”
In seeking to compel testimony and introduce evidence, federal prosecutors have argued that the information Menendez is hoping to protect does not relate to “manifestly legislative acts,” CNN reported. The question is currently being decided in court.
But, the very fact that the senator is seeking to hide communications from the government could be construed as evidence of his own guilt, according to the senator himself.
“If you’re not speaking to a terrorist abroad, I don’t think you should be concerned, from everything I know about this program,” Menendez said on MSNBC on June 18, 2013, when asked about surveillance regimes revealed by Snowden.
While he didn’t specify what program he was talking about, Menendez may have been referring to the bulk telephony metadata collection program–a regime that, through secret court orders, collects information about phone calls, including entirely domestic communications made by millions of American citizens.
NSA supporters have said that it is Constitutional because a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge oversees it and because, through the FISC orders, the government can’t access the content of phone calls but rather details about phone calls. But researchers have shown that the information can reveal intimate information about targets–including details about their romantic lives, health problems, gun ownership, and religious affiliations–and reports have shown how FISC is a veritable rubber stamp body. It approves of 99.97 percent of the government’s surveillance requests.
The program, therefore, critics say, violates the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which stipulates that search and seizure of “persons, houses, papers and effects” can only be conducted “upon probable clause.” Menendez apparently disagrees, and thinks it’s justified to figure out who is “speaking to a terrorist abroad.”
By his own standard, then, Menendez should be locked up for merely claiming Constitutional privacy protections. If he wasn’t illegally engaged in quid pro quo and asking his staffers to take part in the conspiracy, why does he want to withhold information from the feds?
