Secret meetings with Egyptian officials. Google searches about the value of a kilo of gold. Cash-filled envelopes stuffed into boots and jackets.
These are just a handful of the clues that led the U.S. Attorney’s Office to a years-long corruption scheme involving U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez and three New Jersey businessmen, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni said during closing statements Monday in a federal trial against the senator and two of the three businessmen.
“Sen. Menendez wasn’t acting weirdly. He was acting corruptly,” Monteleoni said. “He was acting corruptly. He was acting like a bribed man, because that’s what he was.”
Menendez — who did not testify in his own defense — is the first sitting senator in history to be charged with acting as a foreign agent. Prosecutors allege he took lavish bribes from the businessmen — one of whom pleaded guilty before the trial and is cooperating with authorities — in exchange for interfering with criminal cases and doing favors for Egypt’s government. He has maintained his innocence, with his attorneys arguing that he acted on behalf of constituents who happened to be his friends, but that he didn’t do so corruptly.
Over more than two hours, Monteleoni stitched together a complex web of promises and payments, accompanied by a trove of text messages, emails, call records and receipts that he said proved Menendez traded his power as the senior senator from New Jersey for bribes that would keep his girlfriend — who later became his wife — happy.
“You saw again and again a pattern of corruption,” Monteleoni told the jurors, adding, “The pattern was the same. Menendez was in charge. His wife, Nadine, was the go between.”
Nadine Arslanian Menendez is accused of serving as the businessmen’s primary point of contact in the schemes, but will be tried separately, after requesting a delay to undergo cancer treatments.
The government’s closing statement is expected to continue Tuesday, with statements to follow from attorneys for each of the defendants.
As Monteleoni addressed the jury Monday, Bob Menendez, dressed in a navy suit and striped tie, looked on, his shoulders slightly hunched. The 23rd-floor courtroom was packed with spectators, including U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who leaned forward with his eyes wide as his assistant explained the term “quid pro quo,” to the jurors. The legal phrase means “this for that” — and proving such arrangements to the jury would be key to securing a guilty verdict in the corruption case.
Bob Menendez, his wife and three New Jersey businessmen — Fred Daibes, Joseph Uribe and Wael Hana — were indicted last year on corruption charges. Prosecutors said the businessmen gave Bob Menendez and his wife cash, gold bars, payments toward a home mortgage and a Mercedes Benz, among other bribes. Monday, Monteleoni also detailed an intricate arrangement that he said landed Nadine Arslanian Menendez a “sham job” in Hana’s company.
The U.S. attorney’s office alleges that in return, Bob Menendez used his power as then-leader of the Senate’s foreign relations committee to provide sensitive information to the Egyptian government, to approve or remove holds on military equipment sales and financing to Egypt, and to help Hana’s business secure an exclusive deal for certifying halal meat exports to the country.
In one instance, Monteleoni said, the senator ghost-wrote a letter from Egyptian officials asking the U.S. government to release a hold on more than $300 military aid even as he publicly criticized the Egyptian government.
Prosecutors also said Bob Menendez tried to intervene in criminal probes connected to both Daibes and Uribe.
Uribe pleaded guilty to several federal charges earlier this year. During trial, he told the jury he bought a Mercedes for the Menendezes so that the senator would try to quash criminal investigations tied to his trucking and insurance companies. He described begging for help as he sat on Bob Menendez’s patio, drinking Grand Marnier while the senator smoked a cigar.
Early in the trial, an FBI agent who searched the Menendez home testified that he found so much money in the house that he had to call for back-up and extra cash-counting machines. Investigators recovered more than $480,000 — including wads of cash in envelopes tucked inside the senator’s jackets — and more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, according to the indictment.
Bob Menendez has maintained he only kept large sums in his house because his family had faced confiscations in Cuba. The senator’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez, testified that hoarding cash was a normal practice in their family, which emigrated in 1951, the AP reported.
The senator’s attorneys have also argued that his wife kept her own financial struggles from him, and didn’t tell him she’d been accepting expensive gifts from friends. But during his closing statement, Monteleoni said repeatedly that Bob Menendez knew what was going on, and showed jurors text messages and phone calls that he said showed the two were in cahoots.
“He is detailed-oriented,” Monteleoni said, adding the senator didn’t become leader of the foreign relations committee “by being clueless.”
Bob Menendez told reporters outside the courthouse Monday that “the U.S. government is intoxicated with its own rhetoric.”
“They spent two hours on charts,” he said, before ducking into a black car.
He sat out the Democratic primary for his Senate seat last month but filed paperwork to run as an independent this fall. Rep. Andy Kim has secured the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Curtis Bashaw. An April poll found the senator would be unlikely to win more than 6% or 7% of the vote if he runs, but it also found his presence in the race could tighten Kim’s expected lead to just a few points.
This was Bob Menendez’s second federal bribery case after being charged in 2015 with trading political favors for donations and other perks from a West Palm Beach eye doctor. A jury couldn’t reach a verdict in his first trial.
Nancy Solomon contributed reporting.