In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.

The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.-government information to the Egyptians and tried to shield two of the defendants from prosecution.

This isn’t the first federal corruption case against Menendez, and his continued representation of his state in the Senate and as head of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee (at least up until today: Menendez stepped down from the chairmanship after his indictment) are a testament to the pusillanimity of Democrats. The news also shows how the heated partisanship of the current era can keep bad politicians in office for fear of helping the other party.

The indictment includes claims that New York accurately characterizes as “cartoonish.” In Menendez’s closet, FBI agents found envelopes full of cash in the pockets of jackets that had Menendez’s name sewn on them. They also turned up more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, like in some sort of harebrained Yosemite Sam scheme. (For good measure, the bars are stamped Swiss Bank Corporation.) Prosecutors also cite texts from Nadine to Bob Menendez complaining that a co-defendant, Wael Hana, had not paid the bribes he’d promised. And prosecutors allege the senator agreed to derail a prosecution in exchange for a Mercedes C-300 convertible. The document is, perhaps needless to say, a compelling read.

If corruption allegations against Bob Menendez sound familiar, that’s not just because you’re familiar with the recent history of other Democratic senators from New Jersey. In 2015, Menendez was indicted by federal prosecutors for a sweeping bribery scheme, alongside a doctor named Salomon Melgen.

The evidence against Menendez seemed compelling, but he got a lucky break: In the midst of his trial, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, a decision that, Matt Ford wrote, “fundamentally changed the standard for bribery.” The jury hung, the Justice Department dismissed charges, and Menendez got off with a severe admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee. (Melgen was later convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for Medicare fraud. Donald Trump commuted his sentence in one of his last acts as president, crediting Melgen’s “generosity in treating all patients especially those unable to pay or unable to afford health-care insurance”—on your dime.)

By then, as the journalist Dick Polman wrote in The Atlantic, Menendez had “escaped more scrapes than Houdini,” and his name was “synonymous with ethical lapses.” The moment would have seemed right for Democrats to be rid of Menendez. Not only was he an ethical liability in his own right, but his presence also undercut the corruption accusations the party was lodging against Trump. But they didn’t want to expel him from the Senate, because New Jersey’s governor at the time, Chris Christie, is a Republican, and could have appointed a Republican to the seat. So Menendez stayed, and in 2018 was reelected to the Senate.

Some people might lay low for a while after a fortuitous escape from the law, but prosecutors say Menendez promptly went back to doing corruption in spring 2018, around the time of his censure. The scheme was helped by the fact that in February 2018, just after charges were dropped, Menendez became the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Three years later, when Democrats retook the Senate, he became the chair. That gave him a perfect position to use his power to benefit Egypt.

Menendez says he’s innocent, and released a scorching statement this morning. “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said. “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists. The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”

He added: “Those behind this campaign ... see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.” That sounds a lot like Trump’s “I’m being indicted for you,” and his claims that he’s the target of retribution by the “deep state.” Menendez’s protests are hard to take seriously given that New Jersey is run by Democrats and the president is a Democrat (though Menendez is not a close pal of Biden’s), but voicing these arguments could help validate Trump’s defense against his own indictments, just as Menendez’s presence undermined the political case against Trump in 2018. But Democrats may have only delayed their headache, because Menendez is up for reelection in 2024. His travails could give Republicans a chance at taking his seat.

Menendez’s survival has left New Jerseyans, and Americans, with an ethically compromised senator, because Democrats were afraid that getting rid of him would produce a Republican senator—something they viewed as even worse. Today’s politics is suffused with what political scientists call negative partisanship—the phenomenon where partisans are more motivated by fear and loathing of the other party than affection or affinity for their own. In this way, Menendez’s indictment echoes the 2024 presidential election too, in which each party is poised to nominate a candidate based on the belief that he’s the one best positioned to defeat the other side—not for his own talents or character. Are there worse things than losing an election? The Menendez prosecution might offer one answer to that question.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.

The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.

So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.

Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Laughs, Lies, and Fabulist Hate

Last week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.

For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special:

The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”

Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports:

The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.

During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj.

The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”

The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.

In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”

For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor:

There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.

My own take?

Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.

Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”

A Debt Unpaid

In The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination:

On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.

He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”

For example:

If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.

“There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”

Wonder Wall

At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging:

I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off.

But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing.

But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted.

How the First Amendment Works

In Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”

He writes:

The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines.

The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment.

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes:

Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.

It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.

DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket …

Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”)

Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

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“Never touch your idols,” Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “for the gilding will stick to your fingers.” A few days ago, Roya Hakakian argued in The Atlantic that meeting your enemies is even less hygienic. Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, “Has Blood on His Hands,” the headline announced. Raisi had been asked to address the Council on Foreign Relations, and Hakakian wrote in a statement that the invitation was “a political baptism” for a depraved man. Previous Iranian presidents have included a Holocaust denier, but Raisi’s depravity crossed a line: Courts had determined that he ran a policy of mass killings of dissidents in the 1980s. “There is an important distinction between [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil,” she wrote, “and Raisi, who has committed one.”

[Roya Hakakian: Ebrahim Raisi has blood on his hands]

I see things differently: The more odious the geopolitical figure, the more urgent the invitation. Like Hakakian, I am a member of CFR. And yesterday, I, along with a handful of others, attended the Raisi event.

The meeting was not on the record, so I cannot report anything said there. As a reporter whose entire purpose is to write for the public about what he learns, I have to fight the instinct to spit out the gag, which was a condition of my attendance. But even though I cannot report what was said, I can say with confidence that the audience at any gathering like that will come away knowing more, and reporting more competently, than if they had stayed home on principle. Even when the words spoken are off the record, as Raisi’s were, those who hear them will never write, think, or report about him the same way again. That will be to our readers’ benefit. And the more repressive, homicidal, and authoritarian the figure at the podium, the greater the value in hearing him speak. I doubt anyone considered the event a “baptism” or cleansing. Attendees I spoke with expressed skepticism and revulsion; none mistook this for a party in anyone’s honor.

At my first job, as a cub reporter for The Cambodia Daily, my editor sent me off to cover a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen—not because Hun Sen was announcing something important (I could not be trusted with that), but because “he’s the fucking prime minister, and you never know what he’s going to say.” All by itself, that uncertainty made coverage compulsory—and Hun Sen was the strongman leader of a minor country, not a near-nuclear one with an assassination program and genocidal ambitions.

Raisi addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. His speech was covered heavily, and easily debunked in many of its particulars. At one point, the Israeli ambassador, Gilad Erdan, interrupted Raisi’s speech by parading around with a sign that read IRANIAN WOMEN DESERVE FREEDOM NOW. (Erdan was totally ignored by Raisi, then removed forcibly by UN staff.)

In a small group setting, such theatrics—or even just a persistent line of questioning—can actually produce interesting results. The Iranian president appears in public and even campaigns for office, in a sham election system where eligible candidates are groomed and selected by the Guardian Council, which in turn does the bidding of the Iranian supreme leader, who in turn is elected by no one, unless you count a single vote by God almighty. (Now there’s an election in need of monitoring.) Inside Iran, the opportunities for sustained, prosecutorial questioning of politicians of Raisi’s rank are few, and of course any Iranian responsible for such impertinence would put their freedom in jeopardy.

That leaves events such as CFR’s as the rare occasions to see how Iran’s leaders react to pressure, or indeed provocation. “Dialogue is reserved for those with whom we have disagreements,” Hakakian writes. But talking to coldhearted criminals, whether in public or private, can be illuminating. The great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci spent more than a week begging Raisi’s erstwhile boss, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for an audience. He was a stern and charmless figure, used to being surrounded by obsequious religious students, and about as likely as a Pet Rock to have his mind changed by dialogue with Fallaci. Her irreverence, and his peevish but vigorous replies, remain among the great documents of Khomeini’s personality. She scoffed at Iran’s segregation of the sexes and forced veiling of women. “By the way,” she asked, “how do you swim in a chador?”

KHOMEINI: This is none of your business. Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it.

FALLACI: That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done. But tell me something. A woman such as I, who has always lived among men, showing her neck, her hair, her ears, who has been in war and slept in the front line in the field among soldiers, according to you, is she an immoral, bold and unproper woman?

KHOMEINI: Your conscience knows the answer.

Until a politician is pressed in this way—especially a politician who lives in a cocoon of sycophancy—it is impossible to know what he’s made of. Will the sight of an unveiled woman cause him to shriek in fear? End the conversation in disgust? Or will he be stolid and unmoved? In the answer is the difference between a murderous neurotic and a murderous sociopath. Puzzlingly, Khomeini reacted differently altogether, Fallaci reported. He laughed. His son Ahmad told her it was the first time he had seen his father react this way to anything.

[Read: How Oriana Fallaci's writings on Islamism are remembered—and reviled]

At the UN, Raisi’s speech was littered with crackpot geopolitical claims, such as that the Islamic State “was created by the United States.” And it contained more sinister implications. He described Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was killed by an American missile in Baghdad in 202020, as a “martyr in the path of the freedom of the nations of the region.” (This is what “freedom” means to Raisi: rule by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus.) Soleimani, a soldier, was allegedly on a military mission that threatened the lives of U.S. personnel in Iraq. “We will follow the implementation of justice” for his killing, Raisi said to the General Assembly, “through a fair court, until a definitive result is reached.” But he also suggested that the “fair court” would be at most a formality, because the culprits—former President Donald Trump, along with members of his administration—had already admitted guilt and “printed his name on the case.”

Raisi was a judge for years before he became Iran’s president, and to me, that line sounded like a death sentence pronounced in absentia against former U.S. officials. The words were chosen with care; I doubt We will execute Donald Trump would have been met with the same bored expressions worn by the delegates present for Raisi’s rather more subtle formulation. An in-person meeting is the only venue, public or private, in which to demand that he resolve ambiguity on this subject. He could add clarity and say that Iran is a civilized, modern country, and does not go around killing people. And even if he refused to answer—well, refusing to say, on direct invitation, We are not trying to kill Donald Trump (or Salman Rushdie, or Masih Alinejad) would itself be an answer, revelatory of Raisi’s character and of the regime he leads.

One might object that all of these supposed revelations are in fact common knowledge among anyone who has observed Iran closely over the past five decades. To the Iranian dissident activists holding signs and hooting insults at Raisi near the UN yesterday—I went out and spoke with them after the CFR event—the deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen have already revealed plenty.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran has recently attempted to soften its public image, to say through implication what in previous times, before the discovery in Tehran of the darker arts of public relations, would have been said directly. To translate, detect, and expose these innuendoes takes constant refreshment of one’s sense of the people who say them. And for that, nothing beats sitting in their presence and talking.

The activists seem to think being in Raisi’s presence might beguile people into believing what he says or even developing fuzzy feelings toward his delegation. The attendees were polite. Raisi’s haters want anyone in his presence to address him with the same venom they would. Another strategy is to maintain just enough politeness to keep the subject speaking, ideally more than he wishes he had.

As I left the meeting with Raisi, a smiling Iranian official offered me an elegant tote, “a gift of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” I declined, and may have even recoiled involuntarily when I realized that I had nearly taken a goodie bag offered on behalf of a man who runs an assassination program. When I looked back on my way to the elevator, the official looked dejected, and I saw behind him a whole table of gifts, brought all the way from Tehran, and incapable of being given away in New York.