Closing statements wrapped Thursday in the Manhattan Federal Court corruption trial of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, with jurors expected to begin deliberations Friday.
The jury will soon decide whether the senator, who is currently running for reelection as an independent, is guilty of 16 felony counts including bribery, extortion, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction.
Federal prosecutors got the chance Thursday to refute the closing arguments of defense lawyers representing Menendez and his two co-defendants in the trial.
“So much of what you’ve heard in the past two days is not based on the evidence,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal told the jury. “It’s not based on fact. It’s not based on common sense.”
Over the course of the two-month trial, the jury saw mountains of evidence that prosecutors said proved Menendez and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for favors — including interfering in criminal investigations, attempting to influence state and federal prosecutors to go easy on his business associates and secretly helping the government of Egypt.
Over the past two days, lawyers for Menendez and businessmen Fred Daibes and Wael Hana repeatedly argued there’s a lack of evidence explicitly showing the defendants carried out the crimes.
They contended that the feds failed to establish that the gold bars and cash stuffed in coat pockets, closets and old boots were actually bribes.
“Just because someone says something loudly, with emotion, with passion doesn’t make it true,” Richenthal said in his rebuttal Thursday.
The prosecutor also addressed a key strategy from Menendez’s lawyers — trying to shift blame onto Nadine Menendez — incredulously repeating the defense’s argument that Nadine, not her husband, could have stashed cash in the senator’s jacket pocket and in a Forever21 bag in her closet.
The attorney asked the jury whether it’s realistic that Nadine was “a diabolical genius who conducts a plan with Wael Hana and Fred Daibes to dupe [Menendez] for five years, including when they’re living together?”
During the trial, jurors saw records of meetings between the businessmen and the high-flying couple, text messages and search history.
Menendez, former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is accused of taking bribes to recommend to the Biden administration candidates for a top federal prosecutor job in New Jersey, who would handle Daibes’ criminal case, as well as for disrupting a criminal investigation into the trucking industry.
In June 2022, the FBI searched the senator’s New Jersey home and found over $480,000 in cash, some hidden in jacket pockets and old boots, along with the gold bars.
“Mr. Daibes was known for his generosity,” his lawyer Caesar de Castro said Thursday of the real estate magnate, who is accused of giving Nadine gold bars worth thousands of dollars.
Jurors will finish receiving instructions on deliberations on Friday morning and are expected to begin weighing the case before lunch, said Judge Sidney Stein.