Cory Booker Belongs in Jail Over Newark’s Water Crisis

A normal person wouldn’t be running for president, he’d be in prison.

August 23, 2019

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Don’t drink the water in Newark.

The only thing worse than the crime and corruption in the New Jersey city that gave the nation Cory Booker is its drinking water. First, they found lead in the water in schools and then in people’s homes.

In some homes the lead content in the water is four times higher than the federal limit.

And Cory Booker, the Senator from New Jersey, running to run the country, is blaming racism.

"Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention. Everyone deserves clean, safe water - it's shameful that our national crisis of lead-contaminated water disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities like my own," Booker tweeted.

Did a “national crisis” cause Newark’s clean water crisis?

Booker probably forgot that he had served as the ex-officio chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation. It's understandable that Spartacus forgot all about it because while he was running Newark, he never actually attended a single NWCDC meeting.

And, after a while, he stopped even pretending to send a representative.

The NWCDC was being paid $10 million a year to manage Newark’s water.

Linda Watkins-Brashear, a Booker ally and donor, worked as the director of the NWCDC. At least until she was arrested, tried and convicted in a $1 million kickback scheme. The scandal broke during Booker’s final year in office. And the NWCDC, Board of Trustees, which he was supposed to be overseeing, took swift action by dissolving the board, and writing a $450,000 check to Brashear.

It was Brashear’s second severance package. The first one, of $200,000, came when she left for three weeks while still continuing to receive her salary. That was the same year Booker took office.

Nice work if you can get it.

By the end, Booker hadn’t even bothered sending representatives to NWCDC board meetings, which were being illegally decided by three people, while handing his political ally years of no-bid contracts.

Brashear had donated thousands of dollars to Booker and volunteered on his campaign. And she used the organization that was supposed to oversee Newark’s clean water to write $200,000 in checks to herself, lose $558,000 in high risk margin trading, give her ex-husband a $332,000 no-bid interior design contract, loan $20,000 to the National Black United Fund, and cover a lobster and cognac dinner.

And now, mysteriously and inexplicably, there’s a “national crisis” of lead in Newark’s water.

You can have clean water for the people or cognac for Democrat fixers, but not both.

It truly is shameful that this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s corrupt political allies stealing money meant to ensure clean water “disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities”.

President Cory Booker will make sure that the “national crisis” will affect people of all races when his crooked Democrat associates are running the country the way that they ran Newark.

Booker is black. As is Brashear.

As is Donald Bernard Sr., the senior projects manager of NWCDC, who was sentenced to 8 years in prison after pleading guilty to accepting $1 million in bribes from contractors.

Clearly, this is a national crisis of environmental racism.

How did the NWCDC get away with this for so long?

Its general counsel, Elnardo Webster II, was Booker's former law partner, friend and advisor. Elnardo was working for Trenk, DiPasquale, Della Fera & Sodono, which was also Booker’s former law firm. While the firm was making a fortune from city contracts, including for NWCDC, it was paying Booker $700,000.

A judge levied major fines against Booker’s former law firm over its NWCDC work.

Yes, this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s sleaziness must be urgently addressed as he now holds an office in the national government and would like an even bigger national office.

“Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention,” insists Booker, who never attended a single meeting of the organization that was supposed to be overseeing it.

According to Booker, who spent most of his time in office alternating between Twitter and Oprah, he just couldn’t find the time. Clean water never got his attention, immediate or otherwise.

Back in May, Cory Booker had introduced the Water Infrastructure Funding Transfer Bill to help Newark move money around. "Communities across the country don't have clean drinking water, and those communities are disproportionately low-income and communities of color,” he claimed.

A normal person who chaired a board of trustees that committed flagrant illegalities, overseeing an organization where millions of dollars were stolen by one of his donors, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a disgraced law firm connected to the scandal, all of which put the public at risk, would not be appearing running for President. He would be in prison.

The environment didn’t cause this. It’s not a national crisis that somehow “hit” Newark. It’s not racial discrimination against “communities of color”.

Cory Booker keeps trying to blame racism for the actions of his corrupt political associates. And the Democrats keep acting as if their corruption is some sort of national problem to be blamed on us all.

Edward McRae, an NWCDC employee, set up a landscaping company to get NWCDC contracts, even though he had no experience in landscaping.

McRae said that he met Brashear while working on an unstated political campaign and heard that it was raining contracts. It’s unknown whose campaign it was, but it was certainly a Democrat campaign.

While Booker’s pals were robbing the NWCDC blind, they knew better than to actually drink the water.

The OSC investigation found that public funds weren't just being used to buy lobster, filet magnon and cognac, but $534 for imported drinking water from Florida.

It’s shameful that the former party of segregation fastened on to black communities like a leech while blaming its corruption on racism and an imaginary national crisis. It’s shameful that the media promoted Booker’s routine as a progressive social media guru while failing to hold him accountable.

Instead of apologizing, Cory Booker is trying to shift the blame for his action and inaction to all Americans. He’s trying to blame racism, instead of blaming his thieving donors and allies.

When the NWCDC was stealing money meant for clean water, Booker pretended he knew nothing. Now he knows that bottled water is being handed out in Newark because of a national crisis of racist water.

Before Brashear was sentenced to 8 years in prison for stealing almost $2 million, her lawyer claimed that, “there is no crime here”.

Hundreds of cities, and thousands of agencies and organizations across the country have been robbed by Democrat politicians, donors and activists, the same way that Booker’s pals robbed Newark.

But there’s never a crime. It’s always a “national crisis” that gets blamed on social problems and racism.

When the schools don’t work (the $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg plugged into Newark’s schools on Booker’s behalf might as well have been set on fire), and the power is out, and there’s no clean water, when residents aren’t evacuated ahead of a hurricane and the buildings are falling apart, it’s racism.

It’s never the fault of the Democrats who are responsible for the schools, the buildings and the water.

If only we cared enough, the media tells us, children wouldn’t be drinking water with lead. If only we paid higher taxes and sacrificed more, Booker’s associates would have been able to drink twice as much cognac and gorge on twice as much lobster, king crab and filet mignon.

And now, despite years of EPA warnings, Booker is demanding that the federal government get involved. He’s right again. The federal government ought to get involved. And it ought to involve handcuffs.

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