WaPo: Hugin Ad False, ‘Fails Test’ of Honesty

New Brunswick, NJ – The Washington Post Fact Checker today picked apart greedy, CEO Bob Hugin’s latest false smear against Bob Menendez and gave it FOUR Pinocchios, citing “no evidence” to back Hugin’s claims.

“Bob Hugin is a liar and a fraud who lacks the integrity, honesty and fitness to be a United States Senator,” said Menendez for Senate Communications Director Steve Sandberg.  “No one should be surprised that a man who got rich by preying on the sick and suffering, gouging cancer patients and putting them at risk for potentially deadly side effects, would have no qualms about lying to the people of New Jersey to get elected.  Hugin’s blatantly false and shameful ad is a despicable act by a desperate man.”

According to the Washington Post Fact Checker, entitled “There’s still no evidence Robert Menendez slept with underage prostitutes. A new attack ad says it anyway.”:

• “To accuse a rival candidate of maybe sleeping with underage prostitutes, solid evidence is an absolute must. The evidence for Hugin’s ad fails the test. There’s nothing new in the ad except for a dark descent into corrosive haze.”

• “…this ad is outrageous,” said Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who was the executive director of CREW at the time. “I can tell you definitively that there was no evidence ever to support the underage-prostitution allegations.”

• “The Hugin camp says he is not accusing Menendez of sleeping with underage sex workers, only that people should take a fresh look at these accusations in the changed climate of the #MeToo era. That’s a neat trick: Throw a bomb onto the battlefield and ask the crowd to defuse or detonate.”

• “These claims emerged days before Menendez was reelected to the Senate in 2012. The FBI and a platoon of reporters from national and New Jersey news organizations spent months investigating whether the senator was committing sexual crimes with minors outside the country. The accusations were never substantiated.”

• “[FBI Agent Gregory J.] Sheehy was not saying — as Hugin’s ad suggests — that the FBI had proof of the underage-prostitution accusations against Menendez. He was describing [anonymous tipster Pete] Williams’s allegations.  The Hugin ad doesn’t mention Williams.”

• “The affidavit says FBI agents interviewed ‘Y.F.’ and Svitlana Buchyk, two adult women whom Williams had described as sex workers working for Melgen.  In their FBI interviews, both denied that they were sex workers, both said they had been girlfriends of Melgen, and both told the FBI that they never saw Menendez in the company of ‘prostitutes or underage females.’”

• “The Sheehy affidavit also includes this paragraph: ‘As of the writing of this Amended Affidavit, Mr. Williams has refused to meet with the FBI, either by phone or in person. Mr. Williams has not disclosed enough information for the FBI to identify any minors.’”

• According to The Post’s reporting, FBI agents in the Dominican Republic did not find evidence to support the tipster’s claims that Menendez slept with underage sex workers — and an intelligence report sent to U.S. government officials said the tipster, Peter Williams, was fabricated by Cuban agents trying to plant the prostitution story in U.S. and Latin American media.”

• “The purported underage sex workers in the Dominican Republic never came forward, their identities aren’t known, and The Post’s reporting indicates that these accusations were part of a Cuban plot to tar Menendez.”

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