“She had counsel, she had sufficient time with counsel and she clearly waived,” Issa told a group of reporters. “To be candid, my Democratic members were astounded, you didn’t hear any protest when I made it subject to recalling. There was nobody who argued with the point of order of Mr. Gowdy that in fact she had waived.”

Issa said Lerner will likely be called back to testify.

“Our staff, our lawyers are working with her lawyer, and we’ll take it up after the short recess … all four witnesses are subject to recall,” Issa said. “I think we expect that she’ll be back in front of the committee.”

Lerner testified at Wednesday’s hearing, “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) immediately took issue with the committee’s decision to let Ms. Lerner leave without answering their questions.

“She just testified. She just waived her fifth amendment right to privilege,” Gowdy said. “That’s not the way it works. She waived her right to Fifth Amendment privilege by issuing an opening statement. She ought to stand here and answer our questions.”

“We’re often chastised for ‘are you going to bring somebody there just to ridicule them,’ of course not,” Issa said. “When someone says they’re going to take the fifth, you bring them, they take the fifth, you dismiss them.”

“She came, she chose to testify under oath, and then tried to assert,” Issa said. “Rather than disrupt the other three, we continued without her so there’d be time for attorneys to argue this out.”

Congress will be in recess all of next week and return Monday June 3.

“The agents and employees of the IRS who should be public servants, have instead been using their organization, their agency as a political weapon … and it has silenced speech of people around this country,” said Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots.

“That’s why were here today, we want to remind people around the country that the IRS is not a political weapon, and we want to remind people that it’s happening not just in Cincinnati, Ohio,” Martin said. “We demand that the IRS be audited, we want a full investigation, and every single person involved must be held accountable.”

Martin, who in 2010 was named one the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine, was joined by a group of speakers that included Lisa Miller, of Tea Party WDC, and Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty. They took turns addressing the crowd to express outrage at the IRS’ behavior and call for accountability, while also noting that the main problem was “big government.”

Many in attendance expressed frustration at what they felt was an inadequate response from the administration.

The IRS acknowledged that they applied stricter scrutiny to organizations applying for tax-exempt status if their applications included words such as “tea party” or “patriot.” President Barack Obama asked for the resignation of the acting commissioner, Steven Miller and promised he would take steps to ensure “nothing like this happens again.”

“The bottom line is the man was leaving within the next two weeks anyway, so it was merely trying to put a dress on a pig,” Langer told the Washington Free Beacon.

“We must find out how far this went,” Martin said. “A simple resignation of an employee who was already planning to resign anyway is not enough, the people who are responsible must be held accountable.”

They expressed similar concern over the recent revelation that Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS official previously in charge of the tax-exempt division, now acts as the director of the agency’s Affordable Care Act office.

“I think Sarah Hall Ingram needs to be investigated thoroughly,” Martin told the Free Beacon, noting that Hall Ingram and the IRS can no longer be trusted to impartially enforce health care. “Steven Miller was saying … before the Senate that this was bad customer service. Well, I think it’s way more than ‘bad customer service.’”

Jack Moss, of Arlington, Va., came to the rally hoping for the same thing.

“The IRS has been allowed to run amok,” Moss said. “It’s time for people who were in positions of responsibility … to be held accountable for the decisions they either took, or approved, or acquiesced in, whatever it was and heads should roll.”

The protest was planned over the weekend in “coordination with the Cincinnati Tea Party,” which was protesting in front of the IRS’s Cincinnati office at the same time.

As the group protested, the last two individuals to serve as commissioners of the IRS, Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller, appeared before Senate Finance Committee.

“[We] did some very careful analysis of the energy situation, and we came to the conclusion that the oil market is indeed not a free market,” said Fred Smith, the president and CEO of FedEx Corporation. “More importantly, the dependence of the United States on imported petroleum from unstable and in many cases unfriendly parts of the world had created, after nuclear proliferation and biological weapons, probably our largest single economic and national security risk.”

Speaking at the Cato Institute hosted event “Monopolistic Global Oil Market,” Smith recommended a three-pronged approach to shifting American use and production.

“First and by far the most important was to maximize United States and western hemisphere oil and gas production to reduce the dependency of our economy on oil from these unfriendly and unstable parts of the world,” Smith said. “The second recommendation … was to use less petroleum, to reduce the amount of petroleum as a percentage of our GDP. … The third recommendation was to the extent it was economically feasible to do so, try to develop cost effective alternative power systems to diversify the U.S. transport sector away from petroleum.”

His speech coincides with the release of the study “Competition in Global Oil Markets: A Meta-Analysis and Review.”

The report is written by Andrew Morriss and Roger Meiners, and published by Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to reducing America’s dependence on oil by educating policymakers and advocating for comprehensive energy reform.” SAFE is a partner of the Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC), the organization co-chaired by Smith.

Morriss and Meiners found that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) “is successful in imposing artificial scarcity, it forces demanders to move up the demand curve and, more importantly from the suppliers’ perspective, increases profit margins for the oil producing countries.” This market manipulation causes Americans to pay unnecessarily high prices for oil.

Smith argued Thursday that OPEC’s cartelization necessitates U.S. energy independence, a realization that led Smith to join the ESLC.

“In 2006, I was contacted by General P.X. Kelley who along with the CEO of SAFE, Robbie Diamond, had come up with the idea of putting together a group of former military officers … and business CEOs whose enterprises used a great deal of petroleum,” Smith said.

Smith has a stake in this fight: By his account, FedEx uses “over 1.5 billion gallons a year in the various FedEx operating companies.”

“Accordingly, we were exceedingly interested in the seemingly inexorable rise in the price of fuel that had begun in the early part of this decade,” he said.

This rise in fuel prices, and subsequent increase in the cost of doing business, is attributed in large part to the outside influence of OPEC. The recommendations Smith provides are intended as a response to the issues Morriss and Meiners identified in their study.

Morriss said he and his co-author feel there is a “broad understanding” that OPEC is a “clumsy cartel.”

However, not everyone sees OPEC as a hindrance. It may be a “clumsy cartel,” said James Smith, the Cary M. Maguire chair in Oil and Gas Management at Southern Methodist University and the final panel member, but we should not “lay the blame for [oil price] volatility at the foot of OPEC.”

Rather, he said, OPEC “[has not] been unstable enough to cause price volatility entirely,” pointing to natural gas as an example of a commodity that has been “much more volatile, and there’s no cartel in natural gas.”

Smith concluded his remarks by noting, “In retrospect, the ESLC’s recommendations have been effective and we feel quite strongly that they are the continued courses of action that this country should take to mitigate these national security and economic risks.”

Bloomberg reports:

Salomon Melgen, the Florida political donor at the center of a criminal probe, said he and Sen. Robert Menendez are “like brothers” who spoke weekly, yet his companies never benefited and he broke no laws.

“I don’t have any business interests at all that have been helped by any politicians,” Melgen, an ophthalmologist, said at his office in Port St. Lucie on Florida’s east coast. [...]

A grand jury is examining whether Menendez improperly helped Melgen in his business dealings, according to the Washington Post. The senator intervened in a Medicare-billing dispute and urged the U.S. government to press the Dominican Republic to enforce a contract with a Melgen company to provide port-security services, the newspaper said. 

The Menendez-Melgen relationship has been widely reported on in recent months and Menendez has been tied to numerous instances in which he appeared to act on behalf of his longtime donor.

Menendez intervened in a port security deal involving one of Melgen’s companies and also intervened with federal health officials as Melgen faced an audit regarding his Medicare billing practices. The senator is facing a grand jury investigation of the claims.

Melgen acknowledged speaking with Menendez about “his problems with Medicare regulations and the port contract.” However, the doctor insists he has not been involved in a quid pro quo, telling Bloomberg he wants to “restore his reputation,” which has been “tarnished” by recent headlines. 

“They took away my dignity,” Melgen, who came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 1979 and still owns a home there, said in the March 21 interview. “They portrayed me as a greedy guy who was with politicians for the quid pro quo.”

The Star Ledger previously reported that four local New Jersey Democratic parties received “big checks totaling $103,500,” which aided get-out-the-vote efforts throughout the state. All of the checks came from Melgen.

Charlotte DeFilippo, the Union County Democratic chairwoman, said Melgen’s money helped Democrats up and down the ticket, but that it was especially meant for Menendez. “I said to him, ‘We need additional funds,’ ” she said, recalling her conversation with the senator. “He said he’d see what he could do, and I received a check.”

Both the senator and Melgen have repeatedly denied accusations of wrongdoing.

According to Politico:

Salomon Melgen had a knack for going straight to the top.

He posed for pictures with President Barack Obama, flew Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on his private jet and sought advice on a port security deal from an ex-CIA agent who helped lead the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Politico has learned. …

Melgen keeps an enviable collection of photos with politicians — including one of him golfing with Bill Clinton — and bragged of using his plane to transport the rapper Pitbull to a Super PAC fundraiser at the Democratic National Convention last summer, according to sources who know him.

Melgen reportedly “briefly schmoozed Obama at a 2010 fundraiser” and flew Reid on his company’s private plane. Reid’s office confirmed to Politico that the senator took the trip, which occurred “last summer to Boston and back for a Majority PAC event,” and noted that it was “in full compliance with FEC rules and fully paid for.”

It has been previously reported that the Florida doctor “donated $700,000 last year to Majority PAC, which spent $582,500 supporting Menendez’s 2012 reelection campaign—which Menendez won by 18 percentage points.”

Melgen has been tied to Sens. Chris Dodd and Amy Klobuchar, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and of course Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.). The Politico article reiterates an increasingly recurrent portrayal of Dr. Melgen as an individual who is adept at inserting himself in top political circles.

The Washington Post published a profile of Menendez on Sunday that described him as an “unusual breed of politician,” largely because of his modest upbringing. It argued the New Jersey Democrat forged relationships with elite donors, such as Melgen, out of necessity.

The Washington Post reports:

“Bob is probably one of the poorest guys in the Senate,” said Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.), his longtime friend and confidant. “He has to scrap and scrape and claw and talk to people to try to raise that money. . . . It makes you vulnerable to something going on.”

Now Menendez’s relationship with one of his wealthy patrons has drawn the scrutiny of the Senate Ethics Committee and a federal grand jury in Miami, which, according to three people familiar with the investigation, is examining his role in advocating for Melgen’s business interests.

Until Menendez’s relations with Melgen drew the attention of investigators, the senator’s influence in Washington had been growing.

He had proved his bona fides as a fundraising powerhouse for Senate Democrats and a hero to Hispanic activists. He ascended last month to the coveted chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and emerged as a prominent player in one of the year’s biggest legislative battles when he joined bipartisan talks over a possible landmark law to remake the U.S. immigration system.

Menendez has been involved in politics since he was 19 years old but says he is still uncomfortable fundraising.

“For me, raising money to fund a campaign is contrary to what I learned growing up in life, which is you work for everything and you ask for nothing,” he said, noting that he has for years supported public financing of campaigns and other changes to let lawmakers focus on their work. “But that’s a reality for anybody who runs for office who isn’t personally wealthy.”

The article portrays the senator as someone ill at ease with the flash and wealth that often surrounds politicians. Recounting a 2010 event hosted by Melgen, the Post describes Menendez as a bit of a wallflower who was “the center of attention but still somehow out of place” amongst the elite Dominicans and American entrepreneurs. Someone who was “with them,” but not “really of them.”

Yet Menendez is known as a “highly effective” fundraiser. “As chairman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee, he raised $129.5 million for the midterm election of 2010, an impressive sum even by the standards of Washington,” the New York Times noted.

Menendez faces allegations that he has intervened on behalf of Melgen in unethical ways. The Senate Ethics Committee and a federal grand jury in Miami have been investigating the relationship, as the Post article notes.

Melgen has been a prolific campaign donor, giving more than $700,000 to Menendez and other Senate Democrats ahead of last year’s election. He has also provided the senator with free flights on his private jet and hospitality at his Dominican vacation home, according to people familiar with their relationship. Menendez has sought to apply pressure on the Dominican government to enforce a contract with Melgen’s port security company and has interceded with federal health-care officials after they said Melgen had overbilled the federal Medicare program for treatment at his eye clinic.

Roll Call reported that Melgen’s contributions to Menendez are actually closer to $1 million, and that Menendez may have also asked Melgen to contribute to four local Democratic committees.

Relationships with financial donors have long been a point of controversy for the senator. He has been tied in recent months to at least six instances that have been seen as dubious.

Menendez advocated for legislation that would have been beneficial to Gaseous Fuel Systems Corp., a company in which Melgen holds stock, in addition to accepting flights on Melgen’s private plane, intervening in the Dominican port deal, and contacting federal officials about an $8.9 million audit of the doctor.

Additionally, “on the very same day Menendez interceded with Obama administration officials on the ports deal [involving Melgen…] he also went to bat for another company involving a heavily disputed Dominican road-building contract.” The senator urged the U.S. government to “pressure the Dominican government” to pay a $42.5 million arbitration award. A Menendez contributor is the president of the company’s only U.S. investor.

As the Free Beacon reported, Menendez once attempted to block the merger of media companies that could have harmed his own stock and financially hurt a campaign donor.

The Washington Post reports:

A federal grand jury in Miami is investigating Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), examining his role in advocating for the business interests of a wealthy donor and friend, according to three people aware of the probe.

Last month, people with knowledge of the case said FBI agents were conducting interviews in the Dominican Republic and the United States concerning allegations against Menendez, including the role he played in advocating for the enforcement of the port-security contract. […]

As part of the grand jury investigation, the three people said, federal agents have questioned witnesses about the interactions between Menendez and Melgen, who contributed $700,000 last year to Menendez and other Senate Democrats. The grand jury has also issued subpoenas for Melgen’s business and financial records, according to two people briefed on the probe who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an on­going investigation.

An investigation by a grand jury typically indicates a “legal escalation,” as a prosecutor “[pursues] allegations with an eye toward possible indictment.” However, the article notes that not every grand jury probe will result in a prosecution.

Both Menendez and his office have consistently denied allegations of wrongdoing. Menendez “would not say whether he knew anything about the [grand jury] investigation” during a Thursday interview with the Washington Post, but he reiterated that an investigation would not disclose evidence of misconduct.

The senator said, “I welcome any review, because I believe, at the end of the day, that my actions have been appropriate. And just as everything that gave rise to this was a smear campaign based on slanders that drove the original story, I believe that when any review reviews the facts, they will determine that I have acted appropriately at all times.”

Menendez expressed content earlier this month when it was reported that a Dominican woman signed an affidavit recanting statements that the senator had paid her for sex. However, the latest report suggests that Menendez’s troubles are far from over.

The radio station WNYC went to look for a former Menendez staffer, Pablo Permuy, in an effort to “better understand the sphere of influence” that surrounds the New Jersey Democrat.

WNYC reports:

WNYC has learned that Sen. Robert Menendez is the honorary chair of a trade organization that relies on a long list of his campaign donors as sponsors and has an address that is a K Street law office in Washington D.C.

WNYC’s Bob Hennelly reports the president of the group, the United States Spain Council, is a former Menendez staffer who was a consultant on a controversial Dominican Republic port security deal worth a half a billion dollars to a major Menendez campaign donor.

It’s Menendez’s relationship with that donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, that’s at the heart of a Senate Ethics Committee probe that has dogged the senator for months.

Menendez’s relationship with Dr. Melgen has raised questions of impropriety and similar inquiries are beginning to form around his relationship with Permuy.

Permuy is the president of the United States Spain Council (USSC), which shares an address with SNR Denton, an international law firm with a lobbying arm. As WNYC noted, SNR Denton’s PAC has made political contributions to Menendez.

According to the radio broadcast, Permuy has worked with numerous individuals and organizations that have contributed to the senator, from the USSC to the lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig.

Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon and former Greenberg Traurig lobbyist, told WNYC that relationships like this are considered “bribery” anywhere except Washington, D.C.

As the Free Beacon reported, “Pablo Permuy served as Menendez’s national security adviser from 2001 to 2003 when then-Congressman Menendez was a member of the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.” Menendez sponsored a $3.5 million earmark for a company that was represented by Permuy.

Dynamic Animation Systems, a defense company headquartered in Fairfax, Va., hired Greenberg Traurig LLP lobbyist Pedro Pablo Permuy in 2008 and 2009 to help it obtain “appropriations for simulation training,” according to lobbying disclosures. …

“The fact that [Permuy is] working for a company that benefits from an earmark from the senator speaks for itself,” said the National Legal and Policy Center’s Ken Boehm. “It has nothing to do with policy. It has everything to do with fundraising dollars.”

“Everything about Permuy suggests that he’s made a career out of his closeness to Sen. Menendez, whether it’s lobbying whether it’s working on U.S.-Spain Council or whether its working w the Senator’s biggest donor, Dr. Melgen,” Boehm said.

The Associated Press reports:

Dr. Salomon Melgen invested in Gaseous Fuel Systems Corp. of Weston, Fla., and joined its board of directors in early 2010, according to the company’s chief executive and a former company consultant. GFS, as the company is known, designs, manufactures, and sells products to convert diesel-fuel fleets to natural gas. The amount of Melgen’s investment is confidential under rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a 2009 document filed with the SEC showed the company required a minimum individual investment at that time of $51,500.

At the same time, Menendez emerged as a principal supporter of a natural gas bill that would boost tax credits and grants to truck and heavy vehicle fleets that converted to alternative fuels. The bill stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, and after it was revived in 2012, the NAT GAS Act failed to win the needed 60 votes to pass.

While the bill was under consideration between 2009 and 2011, the former consultant for GFS spent $220,000 lobbying Menendez’s staff and other congressional and federal officials on the act’s provisions as well as other regulatory issues, according to interviews and Senate records.

Aides to Menendez claim that neither Melgen nor the company discussed the legislation with their office or the senator, noting the senator supported the bill “to help improve the environment.”

Melgen’s attorney similarly told the Associated Press that Melgen had not discussed the company or the bill with Menendez or his staff.

Ken Green, an executive with Gaseous Fuel Systems Corp., downplayed Melgen’s involvement in the organization, calling him “a passive investor.”

Melgen joined the board of directors in 2010; the bill first appeared in 2009 and another version came in 2012. The AP noted that GFS is Melgen’s only natural gas-related investment.

He also said that the Senate bill would provide “only limited help” to the company and ultimately noted, “This bill won’t do much of anything for us.”

Green said the bill would not be beneficial because “most of its provisions are aimed at heavy on-road vehicles” and the conversion system designed by GFS is “marketed exclusively for off-road equipment.” As a result Green says the bill would “do little to offset the cost to buyers of the off-road trucks.”

However, Green’s explanation omits key information. According to the Associated Press, the company once considered marketing their product for on-road vehicles. The 2009 and 2012 versions of the bill would change IRS rules giving tax credits for on-road, natural gas-supplied trucks and vehicles.

As the article notes, it is not clear that the New Jersey senator “offered direct help or intervened on behalf of the company or Melgen.” However, the instance raises eyebrows as it “illustrates the way Menendez’s political clout has at times overlapped with Melgen’s financial investments.”

Whether it is port security in the Dominican Republic, Medicare audits, or natural gas, the senator’s relationship with Dr. Melgen has led to a litany of questions that have yet to be fully answered.

The Star-Ledger reports:

“Dr. King said that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” Menendez said, prompting calls of “alright” from some in the audience at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton. “In the end, I believe that justice will overcome the forces of darkness. Scriptures — scriptures tell us that he who ‘puts his hand to the plough and looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God.’

“I have my hand on the plough,” he said, “and I am going to continue to look forward and to work to make that plough lead us to the fulfillment of educational, economic, and health care opportunity in this country.” …

But he did not hide from his troubles. Rather, the New Jersey Democrat addressed the accusations of impropriety as he lashed out:

“Now we face anonymous, faceless, nameless individuals from right-wing sources seeking to destroy a lifetime of work. And their scares are false. I have worked too hard and too long in the vineyards to allow, at my hands, for the harvest to be soured.”

Here’s a roundup of the top “right-wing sources” to point out Menendez’s alleged wrongdoing.

1. CREW:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was the first organization to bring allegations that Menendez engaged in “illicit sexual act with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic” to the attention of the FBI.

According to CREW’s webpage, they are not decidedly left or right but an organization “dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in government and public life by targeting government officials who sacrifice the common good to special interests.”

They have been criticized at times for a left-leaning bias. Roll Call reported in 2008 that the organization paid extra attention to Republicans:

Several news stories — in this newspaper as well as in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and others — have pointed out that much of CREW’s funding comes from liberal groups and big donors to Democratic candidates and causes. And all but a handful of its complaints against Members of Congress have targeted Republicans.

CREW disputed these charges and maintained that they are nonpartisan.

2. The FBI:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been investigating the senator along with his long-time friend and controversial donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen.

The Washington Post reported on the investigation:

One person said agents have asked about whether a Florida eye doctor — a close friend and major campaign donor to Menendez — provided the senator with prostitutes on vacations there. Another person said investigators are looking into allegations involving underage prostitutes and sex parties.

The FBI agents are also examining the role Menendez played in advocating for a port security contract in the Dominican Republic that would benefit Melgen, two people familiar with the case said.

3. The New York Times:

The New York Times uncovered an instance where the senator intervened in a Dominican port security deal that would have benefited a private company run by Melgen.

The intervention with the Department of Homeland Security last month came even though Mr. Menendez has publicly chastised the Obama administration for not doing more to combat the surging drug traffic moving through Dominican ports.

And it came shortly after the senator’s friend, Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, arranged to meet with a senior State Department official, accompanied by a former aide to Mr. Menendez, in a related push to protect the port security contract, which is worth as much as $500 million over 20 years.

The newspaper later reported that the deal would also benefit a former Menendez staffer, Pedro Pablo Permuy, a top executive at Melgen’s security company.

The New York Times subsequently called on the senator to “at least temporarily” relinquish his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in an editorial.

4. The Washington Post:

The Washington Post reported in early February that Menendez contacted “top health-care officials” as Melgen was being audited for overbilling the government $8.9 million.

Menendez (D., N.J.) initially contacted federal officials in 2009 about the government’s audit of Salomon Melgen, complaining to the director overseeing Medicare payments that it was unfair to penalize the doctor because the billing rules were ambiguous, the aides said.

Last year, in a meeting with the acting administrator of the agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, Menendez again questioned whether federal auditors had been fair in their assessment of Melgen’s billing for eye injections to treat macular degeneration, the senator’s aides said.

5. The Associated Press:

The AP noted Melgen contributed $700,000 to a Super PAC that spent over half a million dollars on behalf of Menendez’s reelection efforts.

In 2012, Melgen’s practice gave $700,000 to Majority PAC, a super political action committee set up to fund Democratic candidates for Senate. Aided by Melgen’s donation, the Super PAC became the largest outside political committee contributing to Menendez’s re-election, spending more than $582,000 on the senator’s behalf, according to an analysis of federal election records.

6. The New Jersey Star-Ledger:

The Star-Ledger reported that the senator appeared to have intervened on behalf of another donor.

The road contract, which has attracted scant attention in the United States, involved a firm called Codacsa, a Spanish consortium with U.S. interests, various government records show. At a hearing on July 31, 2012, of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere — then chaired by Menendez — the New Jersey senator called on the U.S. government to pressure the Dominican government on behalf of Codacsa in connection with a $42.5 million international arbitration award, according to an official transcript of the proceeding.

According to the article, the case affected a New Jersey-based company called Clearly Tropical. Clearly Tropical was the sole American investor in Codacsa, and the company is run by a contributor to Menendez.

The paper also reported that Melgen might have made financial contributions to local Democratic committees, at the request of Menendez.

7. The Miami Herald:

The Miami Herald first covered the FBI raid of Dr. Melgen’s West Palm Beach Offices. They were also the first news outlet to directly tie the FBI’s investigation to Menendez.

The agents raided Melgen’s West Palm Beach offices last week. He’s also under FBI examination for his ties to Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, who tried to help Melgen with another Medicare dispute. …

A separate FBI examination revolves around the doctor’s relationship with Menendez and the trips they took on his private plane to Melgen’s villa at a resort in the Dominican Republic.

8. Then there’s the Senate Ethics Committee Inquiry:

The Washington Post reports:

The Senate Ethics Committee is reviewing allegations that Sen. Robert Menendez accepted inappropriate gifts from a Florida doctor who has flown the New Jersey Democrat to his estate in the Dominican Republic, a senior member of the panel confirmed Thursday.

9. Even college students have called on the senator to step down.

The Harvard Crimson writes:

The Foreign Relations Committee is one of the Senate’s most important bodies. Menendez’s troubles cannot distract from its critical work. Neither should it be led by a man who might monetize the position to detrimental effect. For the duration of the ethics inquiry, Menendez should step down from his post. It wouldn’t be proper to replace John Kerry with a Senator who, if the allegations are true, appears to be only slightly less corrupt than “Boardwalk Empire’s” Walter Edge.