Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Alexander Rogi, and today we're talking about the

corruption charges against Senator Menendez and setting those in the context of past corruption

scandals in the United States and the Supreme Court decision that has changed

the landscape for these cases. My guest is a professor at George Washington Law School. Prior to that,

he was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where he spent eight of his 12 years

specializing in white-collar crime as a member of the public corruption and government fraud section,

ultimately serving as chief of that section.

He's a frequent commentator on national television and writes about white-collar crime in his

sidebar's blog.

He's also a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.

Randall Eliasson, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

We all spent so much

time talking about corruption out there somewhere, and it's time to devote a podcast to corruption

within the United States. Let's start with the Menendez trial. Can you just tell us that story?

Sure. So Robert Menendez is a United States senator from New Jersey, first elected in 2006 and

reelected in 2012. He was a Democrat. And he came under investigation by the FBI. Actually,

it initiated with some different kinds of allegations that Menendez has charged or put out by sort of right-wing

publications that accusing him of consorting with underaged prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

And that was sort of how it all began. And those allegations were never proved and never charged.

And it turned out that some of the women may have been paid to try to make

...