Booker, Cory

(born April 27, 1969 in Washington, DC) is an American politician and attorney who has served as the junior US senator from New Jersey since 2013. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University in 1991, a master’s degree in sociology from Stanford in 1992, and a JD from Yale Law School in 1997. Booker then served on the Newark (New Jersey) City Council from 1998 until 2002, at which time he ran for mayor of Newark but lost the Democratic primary to the incumbent, Sharpe James. In 2001, Booker began a five-year stint working for the Jersey-based law firm of Trenk DiPasquale. He left the firm in 2006 when he was elected mayor of Newark, an office he went on to hold for seven years. On October 16, 2013, Booker won a special election for the newly vacant U.S. Senate seat that Democrat Frank Lautenberg had occupied until his death four months earlier. Booker continues to serve in that post and is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

During Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark, the city experienced stratospheric levels of crime, poverty, and corruption. Most notably, Booker was the board chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that was paid more than $10 million annually to run the city’s water infrastructure. When the state comptroller and the Newark Star-Ledger investigated Watershed in 2013-14, they discovered that it was routinely spending money in a profligate manner, awarding no-bid contracts to friends and cronies of the mayor, reaping the benefits of no-bid contracts awarded by the city of Newark, and using taxpayer money as a giant slush fund—at a time when budget shortfalls were forcing the city to lay off police officers and to depend, for its very solvency, upon tens of millions of dollars per year in state aid. For details, click here.

When the Newark City Council formed a committee in January 2012 to investigate Watershed’s spending, Elnardo Webster filed an injunction in court to shut down the probe. When the City Council refused to approve a new contract for Watershed in July 2012, Mayor Booker issued an executive order authorizing emergency contracts that enabled it to operate without Council approval. When the City Council unanimously approved a motion to dissolve Watershed and place the city in charge of it, Booker defeated the measure in court. And in October 2012, the mayor issued yet another executive order authorizing the city’s contract with Watershed to continue.

Meanwhile, from 2006-11 Booker received $698,000 in payouts from Trenk DiPasquale—income that the mayor failed to disclose on his Senate candidacy filings in 2013. When these funds came to light later that year, Booker explained that the money derived from a “confidential” agreement he had made with the firm years earlier. He offered three different public explanations of what the money was for: (a) services rendered, (b) an equity interest, and (c) a separation agreement for work he had performed before becoming mayor.^[1]

Booker’s prevarications have extended also to matters beyond finances. Indeed he has earned a reputation for repeatedly telling emotionally charged, highly detailed, and self-serving yet fictitious personal anecdotes during his political speeches.  Click here for details.

In 2012 Booker conceived of a media startup company designed to give Newark teenagers an opportunity to create and post online videos about news stories which they deemed important, and to thereby join “the national conversation” and become potential “voices of change” in their communities. To bring Booker’s vision to fruition, the mayor’s friends in Silicon Valley created the video-sharing website Waywire, whose largest shareholder (with $1 million to $5 million worth of shares) was Booker himself. Melanie Sloan, executive director of the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, noted that “if you’re getting a large percentage just because you’re a well-known political figure, that’s a little bit problematic” because “people tend to prefer their political figures not to be cashing in on their positions of public trust.” When critics speculated that Booker’s new venture might distract him from his political duties, Waywire co-founder Sarah Ross assured that the mayor’s only real task was to serve as Waywire’s “inspiration architect.”

Over the years, Booker has received a few donations from high-ranking officials and/or board members of Islamist organizations. Specifically, from 2013-2018, he received a total of $2,705 in contributions from individuals affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Alliance in North America.