“THIS CASE HAS always been about shocking levels of corruption,” said Damian Williams, the federal attorney for the Southern District of New York. Even by New Jersey standards—and corruption is embarrassingly common in the Garden State—the allegations were indeed stunning. Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s Democratic senior senator, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, a Mercedes-Benz, mortgage payments and gold bars. On July 16th a jury found him guilty of 16 federal charges, which included bribery, fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and corruption.

There was more. Perhaps most damning, Mr Menendez was found guilty of acting as a foreign agent and sharing sensitive information with Egypt and Qatar while using his influence as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr Williams told reporters after the verdict that “this wasn’t politics as usual—this was politics for profit.”