A few days ago, on Friday September 22, the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted the senior Senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, for bribery.

A full copy of the indictment can be found at this link at the New York Times. There is also a detailed summary of the charges in a Department of Justice press release here.

The Menendez indictment gives us the opportunity to look at the conduct of Menendez claimed to constitute “bribery” and compare it to some of the well-known conduct of President Biden.

Is there any significant difference here that makes one bribery and the other not?

The Biden family corruption scandal gets deeper with every passing day. Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally opened an impeachment investigation in the House last week, and now the first hearing in that investigation has been scheduled for September 28 before the House Oversight Committee.

So what is the potential impeachable offense? You will undoubtedly recall, in the context of the two Trump impeachments, the endless semantic contortions that took place trying to shoehorn Trump’s conduct into the vague constitutional catchall of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that might support an impeachment.

Now, with Biden, the conduct at issue goes by various euphemisms like “the family business,” “business dealings with foreign nationals,” “influence peddling,” “selling access,” or maybe just “corruption.” Are these impeachable offenses?

Well, how about “bribery”?

Beginning in April 2014 — one month after then Vice President Joe Biden became “point man” for U.S. policy in Ukraine — Joe’s son Hunter took a directorship of Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a fee of $83,333 per month, or $1 million per year. Burisma was then strongly suspected of corruption, and within only a few months it came under official investigation, following the appointment in early 2015 of Victor Shokin as Ukraine’s General Prosecutor.

Then in late 2015 and early 2016, VP Joe Biden engineered the firing of Shokin by threatening to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid, which aid he controlled at that time. Joe later admitted on a widely-viewed video that he threatened to withhold the U.S. aid as the means to get Shokin fired.

So was the million per year paid to Hunter a legitimate business transaction, or was it an obvious bribe to Joe to get him to leverage U.S. aid to Ukraine to protect Burisma from the prosecutor?

I want you to imagine that you have recently taken a job as a senior editor at the New York Times. Your mission, well understood by you, is to co-ordinate the coverage to spin the news of the day in a way to present Democrats in as favorable as possible a light, and Republicans as unfavorably as possible. In particular, you understand that Donald Trump must be shown as the devil incarnate, while Joe Biden is a kindly fellow who just loves his family. No problem.

But now you are suddenly presented with the news of the past few days. The “Justice” Department, under the control of Biden henchman Merrick Garland, has just taken the unprecedented step of indicting Trump, who currently holds a commanding lead in the polls to be the Republican candidate in the next presidential election, for the supposed “crime” of repeatedly asserting that the last election was stolen — an assertion that has been a perennial in presidential politics for decades without anybody ever being indicted for it. Meanwhile, a transcript of a witness’s testimony before a House committee earlier this week has just been released, with the witness having offered testimony to close the loop with the last piece of a clear quid pro quo bribery scheme involving millions going not just to Hunter Biden, but also Joe, with U.S. taxpayer funds used to the benefit of corrupt Russia-allied Ukrainians.

OK, this is a tough one. How are you possibly going to spin your way out of it?