After calling just four witnesses, lawyers for Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey rested their case late Wednesday afternoon in Manhattan federal court, setting the stage for jurors to begin deliberations in his international bribery conspiracy trial early next week.
Mr. Menendez, 70, said that he decided against testifying in his own defense for two primary reasons.
The government, he said, had not proved its case, and he did not want to give prosecutors an opportunity to rehash the charges twice — once on cross-examination and again in closing arguments.
That was “simply not something that makes any sense to me whatsoever,” Mr. Menendez said as he left the courthouse after proceedings ended for the day.
“I expect my lawyers will produce a powerful and convincing summation, deduce how the evidence came out, where they failed across the board, and have the jury render a verdict of not guilty,” he added.
Final summations in the case — first by prosecutors, then by lawyers for Mr. Menendez and two co-defendants, followed by a government rebuttal — are likely to begin as early as Monday afternoon, according to the judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court.
A lawyer for one of the co-defendants, Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer charged with giving bribes of gold and cash to the senator and his wife, rested his client’s case without calling a single witness. Lawyers for the other co-defendant, Wael Hana, who runs a global halal meat certification company based in New Jersey, were expected to call their final witness on Monday morning.
That witness, described in court as a former Egyptian government official who now works for Mr. Hana’s company, has been trying to obtain a visa for nearly a month to travel to the United States to testify.
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Menendez exerted pressure on an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help safeguard a lucrative monopoly that Egypt had awarded Mr. Hana’s company, IS EG Halal. In return, the company funneled bribes to Mr. Menendez through his wife, Nadine Menendez, according to a federal indictment.
Mr. Menendez’s defense case included testimony from two family members — his older sister, Caridad Gonzalez; and Katia Tabourian, his wife’s sister.
Ms. Menendez, 57, has also been charged in the conspiracy. Prosecutors have depicted her as a key go-between and a conduit for bribes that included gold, cash and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Jurors heard her voice in phone messages and were shown scores of texts she wrote. But she never stepped foot in the courtroom during the trial. Judge Stein postponed her trial after she was diagnosed with breast cancer; Mr. Menendez disclosed during the first week of trial testimony that she was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and might need additional radiation treatment. She has pleaded not guilty.
During the trial, much of Mr. Menendez’s defense evolved through vigorous cross-examination of government witnesses, as his lawyers sought to undermine charges that he and his wife took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for the senator’s willingness to use his political clout to do favors for friends and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
The bribery scheme alleged by prosecutors began in February 2018, less than a month after Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, was cleared of charges tied to an unrelated federal corruption case in New Jersey. That case ended in a mistrial in 2017 after jurors were unable to agree on a verdict, and prosecutors decided on Jan. 31, 2018, to drop the remaining charges.
Mr. Menendez also decided against testifying in the 2017 trial, which the jury in the Manhattan case have not been told about.
Since the middle of May, prosecutors have introduced thousands of pieces of evidence, including text, email and voice mail messages that were played aloud in court. The government also questioned more than a dozen witnesses who testified against Mr. Menendez, including a former New Jersey attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, and the state’s top federal prosecutor, Philip R. Sellinger.
Prosecutors have said the senator sought to meddle in criminal matters before their offices on behalf of his allies.
As part of the defense case, Ms. Gonzalez, who is 11 years older than the senator, offered testimony that seemed intended to undermine the government’s claim that cash found during a June 2022 F.BI. search of the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., home came from bribes paid to the couple.
Mr. Menendez said after he was indicted last year that he had regularly withdrawn money from his savings account for decades for “emergencies,” and that he did so “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” His family fled Cuba for the United States in 1951, three years before he was born in New York City.
Ms. Gonzalez, who said she was 8 when the family left Cuba, elaborated in court on her brother’s public account, telling the jury that their father had stored money in a false bottom of a grandfather clock and that her mother, a seamstress, hid cash in the door frame of a closet.
“Daddy always said, ‘Don’t trust the banks. If you trust the banks, you never know what can happen,’” Ms. Gonzalez testified Monday.
After Mr. Menendez’s lawyers called their final witness late Wednesday, Judge Stein questioned the senator, out of the jury’s view, to make sure he understood the decision whether to testify was his alone. Mr. Menendez said he had discussed the matter “at length” with his lawyers.
Soon, when the jury had returned, Adam Fee, one of his lawyers, announced, “Your honor, that was our last witness, and with that, the defense for Senator Menendez rests.”