It's Monday, February 3, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

In all the rush of headlines in recent days, one big story hasn't received adequate attention.

That is the fact that former New Jersey Democratic

Senator Robert Menendez was sentenced last week to 11 years in federal prison on numerous

counts of corruption, including the very first case in U.S. history of a member of Congress being

found guilty of acting as an agent for a foreign

government. Robert Menendez rose to political power in a system that was already marked by

widespread corruption. He was elected the mayor of Union City there in New Jersey in 1986,

the son of Cuban immigrants. He was later elected to the New Jersey General Assembly and then to the New Jersey Senate.

Later he was elected to the United States House of Representatives where he served between 1993 and 2006.

And then when one of the two U.S. Senate seats in New Jersey was vacant, the governor appointed

Bob Menendez to that position. He was later elected to the position. He held it until he resigned

in disgrace from office last year under federal indictment. And not only indictment but trial

and not only trial but guilty verdict on about 16 charges. This is a massive case of

political corruption in the United States. We are talking about the only elected member of the

United States Congress ever to have been found guilty of the criminal charge of acting as an agent

for a foreign nation. The foreign nation in this case was Egypt. But let's go back

just a bit. I said that Bob Menendez comes from a context in which there were already allegations

of corruption. A part of this is just a part of the political system and the way that it is

constructed in New Jersey, but it's also just a part of the story of Bob Menendez. It becomes something of a Greek

tragedy. It becomes a morality tale, as the Victorians would have called it. It is a warning to us all.

But the significance of it has been largely missed by the larger culture, probably just because

...