Will we finally get to the bottom of Booker’s Newark corruption?

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

Most of the media ignored this story throughout his 2013 and 2014 U.S. Senate campaigns, Save Jerseyans, but the scandal known as #Watershedgate might finally be coming back to bite Cory Booker (D-Twitter) on his backside. Here’s hoping.

According to NJ.com today, “[t]rustees for the Newark Watershed Conservation Development Corporation, which state investigators say bilked millions of taxpayer dollars from New Jersey’s largest city, are suing 18 people for their roles in allowing the alleged mismanagement of funds — one of whom is U.S. Senator Cory Booker.”

I explained the scandal more in-depth over here for those interested, and we sure hope you are.

Besides abdicating his oversight responsibilities, how did Booker respond when he was mayor? Not well as Roger Stone explained over at Fox News…

Perhaps most significantly, Booker installed his close friend, former law partner, and campaign treasurer Elnardo Webster as the Watershed’s general counsel. It was an extremely lucrative arrangement for Webster and Trenk DiPasquale, which was paid more than $1 million dollars by the Watershed in the five years after Booker was elected mayor — at least $400,000 of which there was no contract for.

Bottom line? The stench from this scandal is so strong that, at one point in 2012, the unlikely bipartisan duo of Senators Sam Thompson (R-Burlington, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean) and Ron Rice (D-Essex) launched a petition to compel the “New Jersey Legislative Select Committee on Investigation” (a/k/a the Bridgegate SCI) to investigate corruption in Newark City Hall during Booker’s mayoral tenure which spanned 2006 to 2013.

“The people deserve answers to questions such as — what other egregious abuses Cory Booker allowed, how they all happened, what he knew and when — in order for us to recoup stolen and wasted tax dollars and protect them with legislative reforms to prevent it from happening again anywhere in New Jersey,” explained Thompson at the time.

The people also deserve a media that doesn’t give a free pass to their only U.S. Senator who isn’t currently under federal indictment ’cause hey, maybe that could change?

Stay tuned…

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