The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

That man is gone. What sits in his Senate seat now is a careful imitation, a public figure who has learned to wear the early Cory Booker as a costume.

The honest word for this is disappointment, and disappointment weighs more than disgust. Disgust is cheap. Disappointment requires that something was once present to lose.

The pro-Israel money

Across his career, Cory Booker has collected an estimated $800,000 from AIPAC’s political action committee and from individual donors associated with pro-Israel networks that AIPAC bundles and channels.¹ AIPAC’s PAC is itself new, having begun operating only in the 2022 cycle. The recent direct contributions are the relevant ones. FEC filings show Booker received $481,175 through AIPAC’s PAC in the first and second quarters of 2025, with another $226,628 routed through it in the third quarter.² He kept cashing the checks while colleagues began refusing them. When the podcaster Jennifer Welch confronted him on this in October 2025, he sank into his chair and reached for the familiar evasion. Most of his money, he said, comes from small-dollar donors.³ That was a deflection. Nobody asked what percentage of his haul came from AIPAC. The question was why he accepted any of it while Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe deepened and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.^4a

He has been among the more reliable pro-Israel votes in the Senate Democratic caucus since the 2014 Gaza conflict. He co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which the ACLU opposed on First Amendment grounds.⁴ Asked recently whether he believes Netanyahu is a war criminal, he refused to answer, criticizing the International Criminal Court for what he called the singling out of Israel.³ In March 2026, after months of pressure, he announced he would no longer accept “single-issue PAC funding,” a phrasing crafted to apply to AIPAC without naming AIPAC, arriving only after he had already taken more than $700,000 from the lobby in the prior year.⁵ The fairness note belongs here: Booker did back President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear agreement against direct AIPAC and Netanyahu opposition,⁵ so the alignment with AIPAC has never been total. Even so, the Gaza-era pattern is still the worst of it. The pattern is in the public record.

The pharmaceutical money

The pharmaceutical money is older and almost as ugly. In the 2013-2014 Senate cycle, when he ran a special election and then a general, Booker accepted $223,350 directly from the drug industry and its employees, the highest haul of any U.S. senator that year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.⁶ Add donations from drug-industry-adjacent lobbying firms like Gibbons P.C. and the figure climbs past $325,000. Across the six years leading into 2017, his pharmaceutical-manufacturer take of $267,338 led every Senate Democrat.⁷ PolitiFact correctly notes that pharma-industry totals sometimes use broad definitions that include employees and adjacent entities,⁸ and the figure here uses the broader definition. The narrower direct-corporate-PAC number is smaller, but the broader number is the more honest accounting of the donor ecosystem around him. He represented pharma-heavy New Jersey, and on that vote he sided with the industry’s position. He opposed the January 2017 budget amendment from Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar that would have allowed Americans to import lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada. The vote was 46 to 52, with thirteen Democrats joining most Republicans to kill it.⁹ He cited safety concerns, co-sponsored a follow-up importation bill the next month that addressed the safety language, and then suspended pharma donations entirely ahead of his 2020 presidential bid.¹⁰ Principle arrived second, after the calendar.

Wall Street and the private equity machine

The financial industry adopted Booker early and never let him go. From 2013 to 2014, when he ran in a Senate special election and then a general election, he raised $2.2 million from the securities and investment industry, more than any other U.S. senator that cycle, according to OpenSecrets data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.¹¹ In the first quarter of his 2020 presidential bid alone, he led every Democratic candidate in donations from the six largest U.S. banks and the six largest private equity firms, totaling $88,492 from those twelve sources.¹² Apollo Global Management employees gave him $32,100 across twenty-eight donations in that single quarter. Blackstone added $10,200, with another $2,800 from its executive vice chair Tony James.

The clearest moment of apparent alignment with the donor class came on Meet the Press in May 2012. President Obama’s reelection campaign was running an offensive against Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Booker, then Newark’s mayor and an Obama campaign surrogate, told a national television audience that the Bain criticism was “ridiculous” and “nauseating,” and said, on a broadcast he had been booked for as an Obama defender, “Stop attacking private equity.”¹³ His full remarks paired the private-equity defense with a criticism of Republican attacks on Obama’s former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which Booker tried to use as a rhetorical balancing weight. The pairing did not save him. Within hours, the Romney campaign cut the private-equity portion into an ad, and Booker spent the rest of the week walking the remark back. The remark had landed because the speaker had reason to make it. Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly had each given Booker’s first mayoral committee, Booker Team for Newark, $15,400 in 2002, putting more than $30,000 from two of the firm’s principal partners into his political career at the start.¹⁴ Hedge fund manager Lee Ainslie had been financing Booker’s career since 2006, and the same Ainslie turned around and gave $100,000 to Romney’s Super PAC the same year Booker went on television to defend Romney’s industry. The arithmetic is suggestive even if the causation cannot be proved.

The fairness note belongs here too. Booker voted against the 2018 Wall Street regulatory rollback (S.2155), and he co-sponsored the 2023 Secure Viable Banking Act to repeal it after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.¹⁵ He championed the Obama-era conflict-of-interest rules for retirement advisers. The Wall Street voting record is more complicated than donor capture would predict. The donor relationships still raise legitimate questions about influence, access, and the boundary between contribution and constituent service.

The charter school money

Then there is the education-reform industrial complex, where Booker served on the board of Democrats For Education Reform, a donor-backed education-reform organization that has promoted charter-school expansion and other market-oriented school reforms. In 2010, Booker and Republican Governor Chris Christie partnered with Mark Zuckerberg to take $100 million in private money and pursue a top-down restructuring of Newark Public Schools in which charter expansion became a central feature, with another $100 million in matching donations.¹⁶ The announcement was made on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The plan rolled back teacher union power and pushed Newark’s charter enrollment from under 10 percent in 2008 to about 33 percent within a decade.¹⁷ Dale Russakoff’s 2015 book The Prize documented how much of the $100 million was wasted on thousand-dollar-a-day consultants and politically connected vendors, with marginal improvement in student outcomes at the time of her reporting.¹⁸ Later assessments are more mixed. Chalkbeat’s coverage in 2019 reported that Newark’s high-performing charter schools drove substantial citywide academic gains, while the traditional district schools continued to struggle and to lose students and funding to the charter sector.^17a The Newark voters who lived through it answered the experiment in 2014 by electing Ras Baraka, a former public school principal who had opposed the privatization push. Baraka defeated Booker’s chosen successor Shavar Jeffries, a charter school founder backed by the Wall Street network that had built Booker.¹⁷

The Newark Watershed

There is also the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation, the nonprofit that supplied water to half a million New Jersey residents and that was looted on Booker’s watch as mayor. Months after taking office in 2006, Booker cleared the way for his former campaign treasurer and law partner Elnardo Webster to wield influence at the agency. Booker appointed board members from a memo Webster had written on Booker’s old law firm letterhead. The new board then hired Webster’s firm, Trenk DiPasquale, as general counsel, an arrangement that paid Webster $225 an hour and generated more than $1 million in legal fees over five years.¹⁹ Booker himself continued to receive payments of up to $150,000 a year from Trenk DiPasquale, totaling $689,500 between 2007 and 2012, under what his office described variously as a buyout, an equity interest, and a separation agreement for pre-mayoral work.²⁰ He initially omitted the payments from his mandatory U.S. Senate financial disclosures and amended the filings only after his tax returns surfaced. His 2010-to-2012 tax returns reported that he “materially participated” in the firm’s operations during those years, a description his spokesman later attributed to an error by a tax preparer.²⁰

The 2014 New Jersey Comptroller’s report on the Watershed is devastating in its own quiet way. It found that the agency had “recklessly and improperly spent millions of dollars of public funds with little to no oversight by either its Board of Trustees or the City.”²¹ Booker, as ex officio chair of the Watershed board, never attended a single meeting during his entire mayoralty. He sent a city business administrator in his place, and when that administrator resigned in 2010, Booker never named a replacement.²² His explanation, given to the comptroller, was that he had difficulty moving board nominees through the City Council. The Watershed itself was destroyed by corruption. Its executive director Linda Watkins-Brashear, a longtime Booker ally who had donated $5,000 to Booker and his Newark allies between 2008 and 2010 and gave $1,000 to his Senate campaign,²² wrote unreported checks to herself for $200,000, collected $700,000 in severance, and routed more than $1 million in contracts to friends and her ex-husband. At least nine people were indicted or sentenced in connection with the bribery scheme.

In June 2016, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Vincent Papalia dismissed Booker from the civil suit filed by the Watershed’s trustees, citing the New Jersey Tort Claims Act, which protects public officials from personal liability for acts performed within the scope of their official duties.²³ No criminal charges were ever brought against Booker, and PolitiFact has correctly noted that there is no evidence Booker personally laundered Watershed money, as some right-wing actors falsely claimed.²⁴ These caveats matter and belong in the record. So does the rest of it. The honest description is narrower and worse than the legal outcome suggests. Booker followed many of his former law partner’s recommendations for board appointments, and that board then hired the law partner’s firm. The firm enriched itself. Booker took income from that firm while running the city the firm was billing. He failed to disclose the income. The board meetings went unattended for his entire tenure. He was personally protected by the immunity statute when the lawsuit came. The agency was hollowed out. He says he learned of the corruption from press reports. If his account is true, the failure was managerial. If it is not, the problem is worse. Either possibility belongs in the public record.

The 25-hour speech and the book that followed it

The speech is now famous. It surpassed Strom Thurmond’s 1957 segregationist filibuster against the Civil Rights Act by forty-seven minutes.²⁵ A Black senator, the son of civil rights parents, broke the record of a man who had used the floor to obstruct civil rights. Optics that potent write their own press releases.

Its legislative effect was zero. The speech blocked no bill, delayed no confirmation, amended no statute, and moved no vote in either direction.²⁶ What occurred was performance, an act of personal endurance dressed as political resistance. Booker’s stated aim, in his own words, was to disrupt the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as he was physically able. By that internal standard, the speech succeeded for twenty-five hours. Booker stopped eating on the Friday before. He stopped drinking water the Sunday night beforehand. He stood at his desk for over twenty-five hours so he would not require the bathroom.²⁷ As feats of human will go, the marathon was real. As legislation, it was nothing.

What the speech actually accomplished is a short list. It generated headlines. His national profile got revived. The New Hampshire town hall on November 14, 2025, strengthened the impression that he was positioning himself for a possible 2028 presidential run.²⁸ A defender will say the speech focused public attention on the Trump administration. Such focus is the cheapest currency in politics. The speech cost Booker nothing his donors did not want to pay for, and it bought him exactly what the cycle requires, which is visibility he can convert into political momentum without the inconvenience of legislative friction.

Within eight weeks of the speech ending, he had a book deal.

St. Martin’s executive editor Tim Bartlett approached Booker in response to the marathon. On May 28, 2025, the announcement landed.²⁹ The book, titled Stand, was scheduled for November 11, 2025. St. Martin’s then pushed the date to March 24, 2026.³⁰ The new date placed the book in the run-up to the United States Semiquincentennial and the early phase of 2028 primary positioning. CBS Sunday Morning ran an excerpt and an interview with Faith Salie on March 22, 2026, two days before release.³¹ NPR’s Book of the Day featured Booker on April 6, 2026.³² The book is exactly what one would expect from a politician shaping a campaign narrative. It traffics in virtues and North Stars and courageous engagement. The book tour can function as pre-campaign infrastructure, a list-building and donor-attention engine that runs alongside the official Senate office.

This is the loop the article is describing. The speech generates the brand. That brand generates the book. The book tour generates the donor list and the speaking circuit. The speaking circuit underwrites the next campaign. Nothing in the circuit requires policy outcomes or legislative wins. The inference cannot be proved as conscious strategy, but the pattern is real and self-reinforcing. The man at the center keeps a Senate office and runs an enterprise.

The Cory Booker of 1999

In August 1999, as a thirty-year-old member of the Newark City Council, Booker bought a tent, pitched it next to a drug-ravaged high-rise, and went on a ten-day hunger strike to force the city to address open-air dealing. He fasted and slept outdoors in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in one of the grimmest cities in America.³³ The strike worked. Police presence increased. Security for residents improved. The mayor who had ignored him pledged a community park. It cost Booker headaches and back spasms and ten days of his weight, and he came out of it transformed.

Twenty-six years later, the same man went on a different fast for a different purpose. He stopped eating that Friday in 2025 so he could stand on the Senate floor without a bathroom break. The abstention served logistics this time, a body-management strategy for the marathon and the book that would follow it. The residents of any housing project had nothing to do with it.

This is the measurable distance between the two Cory Bookers. In 1999 he starved because somebody else needed him to. In 2025 he starved because his own performance needed him to. The first version was a councilman without a national following risking his health for forty families in a stairwell. The second was a senator with $800,000 of AIPAC-associated money in the account performing solitude inside a chamber whose deliberations he could not actually move. One changed a block. The other built a brand.

Where the values go

One question remains. Where do values go when the soul changes?

The pattern is familiar in modern politics. Values do not have to disappear for a politician to betray them. They can be subordinated, rationalized, and repackaged. They attach themselves to whatever the politician still needs in order to remain who he wants to be. Booker still needs the language of justice, so the language stays. He still needs the image of the reformer, so the image stays. What dies is the friction between the words and the actions. Once a politician accepts the kind of money Booker has accepted from pro-Israel networks during a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the public language inevitably narrows. Condemnations soften. Positions get hedged. Principles get ground down into talking points smooth enough to swallow alongside the donor steak.

Modern Senate corruption rarely arrives in an envelope. It arrives as the agreement, year after year, vote after vote, donation after donation, to stop noticing the gap between who he said he would be and who he is becoming. The corruption lives in the consent to the slow exchange, in the steady muting of the inner argument until the inner argument no longer happens. Nobody can see inside another person’s conscience. The reader can see the votes and the disclosures and the press releases. That is what this argument rests on.

The young man in the Rutgers-Newark lobby would have refused the AIPAC checks. That same young man at Brick Towers would have voted for drug importation from Canada. The councilman who fasted for ten days in 1999 would have looked at a twenty-five-hour speech that achieved no legislation and asked the obvious question, which is why he had bothered. Today’s senator cannot ask. Asking would dissolve too much of what he has become.

What the accomplishments do not erase

None of this denies Booker’s real legislative achievements. He was an original co-sponsor of the First Step Act, the December 2018 criminal justice reform that passed the Senate 87 to 12, and he was instrumental in adding sentencing-reform provisions and juvenile-solitary-confinement limits based on his MERCY Act.³⁴ The work was substantive. Real people came out of federal prison sooner because of it. That accomplishment stands. So does the indictment alongside it. A senator capable of co-authoring the First Step Act was capable of refusing the AIPAC money. The same gifts that produced the bill were available for the refusal. The choice to keep cashing the checks was a separate choice, made with full knowledge.

What is uglier is the way the First Step Act has been weaponized as moral cover for transactional favors to donors. On May 19, 2025, Booker became the only Democrat in the Senate to vote to confirm Charles Kushner as U.S. ambassador to France.³⁵ Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner and the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump, was convicted in 2005 on eighteen counts including tax evasion, witness tampering, lying to the Federal Election Commission, and a revenge plot in which he hired a prostitute to seduce his sister Esther’s husband and recorded the encounter to send to his sister, who was the cooperating witness against him in the federal investigation.³⁶ Chris Christie, who prosecuted the case, called it one of the most loathsome crimes he had handled.³⁷ Trump pardoned Kushner in 2020. Booker’s defense of his confirmation vote was that Kushner had been “unrelenting in reforming our criminal justice system” through First Step Act advocacy.³⁸ The defense is too clever to survive examination. Charles Kushner had been funding Cory Booker since at least Booker’s first mayoral run in 2002.³⁹ Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner held a fundraiser for Booker’s 2013 Senate special election at their Park Avenue home and bundled $41,000 for him.⁴⁰ The Kushner family is one of the longest-running donor relationships in Booker’s career. Criminal justice reform is the public reason offered for the vote. The donor history is the appearance problem that the criminal justice reason does not dissolve.

The status quo dressed as resistance

The pattern is the point. A senator who voted no on the March 2025 continuing resolution and then voted yes to make a convicted felon the ambassador to a major NATO ally has confused branding with conscience.⁴¹ A senator who gives a twenty-five-hour speech on democratic erosion and then publishes a book titled Stand while still cashing AIPAC checks is in a different business than legislation. The marquee actions are real and shallow at once. The deeper actions, the votes and the donations and the silent decisions about who gets a return call, run the other way.

Booker may still be a more humane vote than any Republican on the same ballot, and that comparison is true and beside the point. What this argument is about is the distance Booker has traveled from the man he could have remained. The defense that his race or his religion or his rhetoric of love should disarm the criticism only reinforces it, because those defenses ask the public to evaluate Booker by his self-presentation rather than his roll call votes and his FEC filings. Roll call votes and FEC filings are the only evaluation that has weight.

Verdict from the lobby

I will vote against him in the 2028 primary if he runs, and the New Hampshire trip in November 2025 made clear that he intends to. The vote will be a sad one. That earlier Cory Booker, the one I watched in the Rutgers-Newark lobby, would have voted against the man who now sits in the Senate. The original had standards the current version cannot meet. He would have looked at the AIPAC tally, the pharma haul, the Apollo and Blackstone receipts, and the Bain Capital maximum, and refused each one. He would not have appointed a Watershed board out of his law partner’s memo, taken hundreds of thousands from that same partner’s firm while it billed the city he ran, or skipped every meeting of the board he was statutorily chairing. The book about a speech that achieved nothing legislative would never have been written. He would have written the bill.

The money and the speeches and the books are symptoms. What has been lost is the man. The young Cory Booker, the one who pulled the air toward him in a lobby on University Avenue in Newark in the late 1990s, would today look at the senator using his name and see a stranger who has agreed to be less than he was.

The saddest part of any American political career is the moment the person inside the politician stops fighting the politician. Booker has reached that moment. New Jersey deserves better. So did Newark, twenty-six years ago. So does the man who once believed his own first speech.

Author’s note on disclosure: For almost a decade, I have lived and worked at Journal Squared, a three-tower apartment complex in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City built and managed by KRE Group. KRE is the firm of Murray Kushner, who dissolved his partnership with his younger brother Charles Kushner in 2000 and has feuded with him publicly for a quarter century. KRE and Charles Kushner’s Kushner Companies are operationally and legally separate firms. The essay’s criticism of Senator Booker’s vote to confirm Charles Kushner as ambassador targets Charles, who has no business connection to Murray’s firm or to the building in which I live. My rent has never reached Charles Kushner, and no business relationship has ever existed between the author and any Kushner.

End Notes

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/actual-f-ck-cory-booker-144930288.html For broader tracker methodology aggregating FEC-filing data on pro-Israel donations to members of Congress, see Track AIPAC’s published figures and Jonah Valdez, “How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC?” The Intercept, March 26, 2026. https://theintercept.com/2026/03/26/track-aipac-midterms-2026-israel-palestine/

https://readsludge.com/2025/10/16/while-some-democrats-ditch-aipac-cory-booker-cashes-in/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/actual-f-ck-cory-booker-144930288.html

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/720/cosponsors For the ACLU’s First Amendment objection, see “ACLU Letter to the Senate Opposing Israel Anti-Boycott Act,” July 17, 2017. https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-letter-senate-opposing-israel-anti-boycott-act

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/jns/booker-swears-off-single-issue-pac-funding-cutting-off-support-from-pro-israel-donors/article_7a9355b5-8bdb-515a-8669-88481e5f7013.html

https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/12/cory-booker-presidential-run-pharmaceutical-industry-ties/

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/12/cory-booker-joins-senate-republicans-to-kill-measure-to-import-cheaper-medicine-from-canada/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/02/donald-trump/cory-booker-and-drug-maker-campaign-cash-numbers/

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1151/vote_115_1_00020.htm

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/340303-cory-booker-to-pause-fundraising-from-pharma-companies/

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/28/cory-booker-lines-up-support-in-the-financial-industry-to-help-him-raise-cash-for-2020.html

https://inthesetimes.com/article/booker-harris-wall-street-banks-private-equity-2020-campaign-donations

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/31/why_cory_booker_got_bain_capital_so_wrong_114326.html

https://truthout.org/articles/bain-and-financial-industry-gave-over-565000-to-newark-mayor-cory-booker-for-2002-campaign/ For Lee Ainslie’s pattern of financing Booker and Ainslie’s $100,000 contribution to Restore Our Future, see Lee Fang, “Cory Booker’s Political Career Guided By Top Wall St Donors To Romney’s Super PAC,” Republic Report, May 22, 2012. https://www.republicreport.org/2012/cory-booker-romney-wall-street/

https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-menendez-join-warren-porter-in-introducing-bill-to-repeal-2018-rollback-of-critical-dodd-frank-protections

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-ceo-to-gift-100m-to-newark-schools/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/newark/2018/3/27/21104662/over-40-percent-of-newark-students-could-attend-charter-schools-within-five-years-here-s-how/ For the political and electoral interpretation of the Newark reform push and the Jeffries-vs-Baraka 2014 race, see also Branko Marcetic, “Cory Booker Hates Public Schools,” Jacobin, February 4, 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/02/cory-booker-charters-public-schools-president

https://www.chalkbeat.org/newark/2019/6/18/21108423/newark-schools-traditional-and-charter-have-made-big-gains-since-2006-new-report-shows/

https://www.npr.org/2015/09/21/442183080/assessing-the-100-million-upheaval-of-newarks-public-schools

https://whyy.org/articles/booker-allies-ruined-n-j-water-agency-in-scandal-on-his-watch/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/oct/14/roger-stone/old-roger-stone-video-about-cory-booker-has-gone-v/

https://www.nj.gov/comptroller/news/docs/newark_watershed.pdf

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/newark-lead-crisis-raise-questions-city-scandal-cory/story?id=64969526

https://www.njb.uscourts.gov/sites/njb/files/15-2397_Newark_Watershed_v_Watkins-Brashear_-_Final_Opinion_6-21-16.pdf

https://www.wgbh.org/news/2025-04-01/cory-booker-breaks-a-68-year-old-senate-record-with-a-25-hour-speech

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5348031/cory-booker-breaks-senate-record-with-a-25-hour-speech-in-protest-of-trump-policies

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cory-booker-broke-record-25-hour-senate-floor/story?id=120394287

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/16/cory-booker-democrats-new-hampshire-2028

https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/cory-booker-book-marathon-senate-speech-stand/ The detail that Tim Bartlett approached Booker in response to the marathon comes from St. Martin’s Publishing Group’s own announcement, as quoted in Daily Caller News Foundation coverage of the press release. https://dailycaller.com/2025/05/28/cory-booker-new-book-deal-stand/

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250436733/stand/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-excerpt-stand-by-cory-booker/

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/06/nx-s1-5773435/nprs-book-of-the-day-cory-booker-stand

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200814_pf.html

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senate-passes-landmark-criminal-justice-reform-

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5308588-senate-confirms-charles-kushner-ambassador-france/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/charles-kushner-pardon-revives-loathsome-tale-of-tax-evasion-sex/

https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/senate-confirms-charles-kushner-to-ambassadorship-with-booker-voting-yes/

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/presidential-profiles-2020/9-things-to-know-about-cory-booker/

https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/shutdown-avoided-as-some-senate-dems-but-not-kim-or-booker-relent-on-gop-funding-bill/