Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and the US Trafficking in Persons Laws

The Human trafficking scandal involving Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) raises further questions about the Obama Administration’s troubling record of selectively enforcing American law for political gain, and the Main Stream Media’s active cooperation with that agenda.

The Drudge Report broke a scandal involving Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) going to a tier 3 Human Trafficking nation — the Dominican Republic — to visit prostitutes. According to the State Department here These are the following U.S. Laws on Trafficking in Persons that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is in jeopardy from —

1. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 (P.L. 106-386),
 
2. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003 (H.R. 2620),
 
3. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 (H.R. 972), and
 
4. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 7311), also known as the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

The TVPA laws are set up for easy extra-territorial law enforcement as they are laws where guilt is a matter of fact and not intent.

Statutory Rape Laws are an example of a law of fact. It does not matter if you didn’t know the person you were sleeping with was under age. If you slept with him or her, you are guilty. Being drunk or any other excuse only applies to the penalty phase, not the guilt or innocence of a felony sex offender conviction.

Similarly, under the TVPA, if you are an American citizen and sleep with a 15-year old prostitute in a Tier 3 nation like Thailand or the Dominican Republic. You are going to be in jeopardy not just for sleeping with a prostitute, but the American age of consent applied to you over seas. Even if the local age of consent is very much under that of the American state the visiting American is legal resident of. [Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) is subject to age provisions of New Jersey Permanent Statues, Title 2C, Chapter 14, Section 2]

Also according the State Department here the last version of TVPA also requires Pres. Obama to impose sanctions of Tier 3 Human Trafficking countries like the he Dominican Republic.

See —

Penalties for Tier 3 Countries
.
Pursuant to the TVPA, governments of countries on Tier 3 may be subject to certain sanctions, whereby the U.S. government may withhold or withdraw nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related foreign assistance. In addition, countries on Tier 3 may not receive funding for government employees’ participation in educational and cultural exchange programs. Consistent with the TVPA, governments subject to sanctions would also face U.S. opposition to assistance (except for humanitarian, trade-related, and certain development-related assistance) from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
.
Imposed sanctions will take effect on October 1, 2011; however, all or part of the TVPA’s sanctions can be waived if the President determines that the provision of such assistance to the government would promote the purposes of the statute or is otherwise in the United States’ national interest. The TVPA also provides for a waiver of sanctions if necessary to avoid significant adverse effects on vulnerable populations, including women and children.
.
No tier ranking is permanent. Each and every country can do more, including the United States. All countries must maintain and increase efforts to combat trafficking.


Too date, no sanctions have been applied to the Dominican Republic
. According to a Federation of American Scientists report “In September 2010, President Obama waived the imposition of any TIP-related sanctions on the Dominican Republic because U.S. assistance to that country is either in the U.S. national interest or intended to help combat human trafficking.”

The Main Stream Media black out of the TVPA implications of both the Secret Service Prostitution scandal (exhibit A) and the new Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) prostitution scandal may simply be a matter of what Glenn Reynolds calls “Democratic operatives with media by-lines” being selective in their reporting.

The problem I have with that thought is that as currently structured, TVPA is a perfect “honey trap” for Americans who use foreign prostitutes, or have legal in foreign country but under age in America liaisons with foreigners, for intelligence services, (or politicians controlling those intelligence services) of any nation, including our own, who wishes to have “undue influence” inside our media, our national security or political establishments.

Reporters have a well deserved reputation as being “high sex drive”. Reporters are widely reputed to be heavy users of foreign prostitutes in the “international hotels.” Hotels that are under continual surveillance by intelligence services of all nations. Whatever jeopardy those Obama Administration Secret Service Agents or Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) face under TVLA, reporters are currently in similar jeopardy and are subject to the same “selective law enforcement pressure” otherwise known as political corruption, AKA THE CHICAGO WAY.

17 thoughts on “Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and the US Trafficking in Persons Laws”

  1. It might help if we, as Confucius said, we name things honestly.

    Human trafficking is slave trading and should be called such. All the euphemisms disguise the true horror of what is going on.

  2. Shannon,

    TIP laws are not about anything except extending the extra-territorial law enforcement power of the Federal government.

    As written and applied, the TIP laws are an exercise in misandry aimed at American men, that are national security and political corruption threats besides.

    When I see American women going on sex tours to the Bahamas and Africa convicted at rates men are, I will believe different about misandry.

    They will still remain national security and political corruption threats.

  3. When it comes to issues like this, LAWS are for little people, not DEM Sentors. We see this in the White House too and others running for SENATE like lying Liz Warren.

  4. I hope this isn’t related, but…What the heck?

    http://www.myfoxny.com/story/19980300/secret-service-agent-kills-self-amid-affair-probe

    A senior Secret Service agent who was being investigated by the government for failing to disclose a long-standing relationship with a foreign citizen killed himself last week in Washington, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

    Rafael Prieto, a married father assigned to the security detail for President Barack Obama, had acknowledged to U.S. investigators that he had been having an affair for years with a woman from Mexico, these people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss Prieto’s death or the investigation. Prieto’s relationship was revealed to Secret Service investigators by an agent who had been entangled in the Colombian prostitution scandal earlier this year, these people say. That agent was concerned that the Secret Service wasn’t enforcing its rules consistently.

    Secret Service rules require that employees with a security clearance notify the agency about any relationship with a foreign citizen to ensure that the person is not a risk to national security. There is no evidence that Prieto’s relationship posed any security threat. Failing to disclose such a relationship would be a violation of the agency’s administrative rules, not a crime.

    and still no mention of TIP laws —

    Those employees were in Caribbean resort city in advance of Obama’s arrival for a South American summit. After a night of heavy partying in some of Cartagena’s bars and clubs, the employees brought women, including prostitutes, back to the where they were staying. The incident became public after one agent refused to pay a prostitute and argued with her in the hotel hallway. Prieto was never in Colombia during the scandal.

    Eight of those Secret Service employees have been forced out of the agency, three were cleared of serious misconduct and at least two employees are fighting to get their jobs back.

  5. …questions about the Obama Administration’s troubling record of selectively enforcing America…

    Hah hah hah !!! hey, good one, mate. Really good one, that.

    What with 4 people dead in Libya, literally hung out to die by Obama’s admin and you’re up in the gizzard about a govt official getting some wankie-poo in the DR and the Obama admin doing nothing about it?

    ROTFLMAO.

  6. “Human trafficking is slave trading and should be called such. All the euphemisms disguise the true horror of what is going on.”

    Menendez is a Democrat. It’s the party of slavery. Always has been. Always will be. They just disguise it today by calling it Progressivism.

  7. Not all states have this “Statutory Rape Laws are an example of a law of fact.” Ohio requires the state to prove that the suspect did not have a reasonable belief that the minor was under 16.

  8. I am hard core anti-dem, but what does any of this have to do with Mendez? I’ve heard nothing suggesting the prostitutes he frequented were under age?

  9. The DR is a favorite place for democrats to go in order to hide their ill gotten taxpayer funds and “play around”. Laws are for the little people, not our democrat aristocracy. Now let’s talk about that democrat “War on Women”…

  10. I am a Republican — yet I agree with the commenters who say this is ludicrous. To paraphrase Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, handing out tickets for visiting prostitutes in the DR is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. To classify prostitution in the DR as human trafficking just doesn’t hold water. The DR is not the US. Prostitution is much more just a part of the culture there. People need to lighten up about this stuff. I also agree with the commenters who say these sorts of attacks are a form of misandry.

  11. Bill, Buck,

    You are both missing the forest for the trees.

    The political corruption potential of a President selectively enforcing these laws on reporters and politicians means we have legal enforcement of political views. The silence on Benghazi may be in part due to threats of career destruction and jail time via TIP.

    TIP laws are a huge lever — a “honey trap” — to hold someone who is “a little dirty” into progressively dirtier and dirtier crimes.

    Go read here —

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypots_in_espionage_fiction
    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/12/the_history_of_the_honey_trap
    http://www.sabotagetimes.com/people/katia-zatuliveter-and-the-art-of-the-spy-honey-trap/
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2124371/Russian-agent-Anna-Chapman-came-close-catching-Obama-official-honey-trap-U-S-spy-catcher-claims.html
    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/12/the_spy_who_said_she_loved_me.html

  12. I suspect that Trent is onto something here. If so, this particular law might not be the enforcement mechanism, but some other law or regulation could be.

  13. The political corruption potential is another reason to get rid of these ridiculous extra-territorial laws. How about this: if you’re in America and you break American law, you’re subject to penalties from American justice, and if you’re in some other jurisdiction, you’re subject to that other jurisdiction’s laws.

  14. A lot of the coverup success may be related to Holder’s aggressive enforcement of the espionage laws on government employees who leak to new organizations, especially Fox News.

    Bloomberg News reported on October 17 that Attorney General Eric Holder “prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft.”

    The Justice Department said that there are established avenues for government employees to follow if they want to report misdeeds. The agency “does not target whistle-blowers in leak cases or any other cases,” Dean Boyd, a department spokesman, said.“An individual in authorized possession of classified information has no authority or right to unilaterally determine that it should be made public or otherwise disclose it,” he said.

    However, when leaks to the press benefit the administration, prosecutions from the Jusitce Department are absent. For example, AG Holder was not prosecuting anyone over who leaked information about the killing of Oasma bin Laden. The Justice Department has yet to charge anyone over leaking information regarding the U.S. involvement in cyberattacks on Iran as well as an al Qaida plan to blow up a U.S. bound airplane. In fact, the Justice Department ended up appointing one of two attorneys to the cyberattacks investigation who was an Obama donor.

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