After sluggish start, Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial reached a breakneck pace Wednesday, with defense attorneys making opening arguments to blame everything on his wife and ending the day by demanding a mistrial.
After two and a half days of hearings, 12 jurors and six alternates were seated, and the case began in the afternoon, with prosecutor Lara Pomerantz methodically presenting the 18 charges against Menendez – a Democrat and New Jersey’s senior state senator – and two of his associates. the defendants, businessman Wael Hana and Edgewater developer Fred Daibes.
“Robert Menendez abused his position for years to satisfy his greed and keep his wife happy,” Pomerantz said. “Menendez put his power up for sale, and Hana and Daibes were more than happy to buy it.”
But defense attorney Avi Weitzman told the jury there were “innocent explanations” for all of prosecutors’ allegations and quickly got to the point of his defense — Menendez’s claim that his wife, Nadine, kept him in the obscure about gold bars, cash, a luxury car and other bribes that she allegedly took from Hana, Daibes and a third co-defendant, Jose Uribe, who pleaded guilty in March.
“The real question for you is: What did Bob know?” Weitzman told the jury.
Daibes and Hana will appear in court alongside Menendez, and their attorneys are expected to make opening statements Thursday morning. Nadine Menendez was also charged, but U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein previously postponed the trial to July due to health concerns.
The senator’s wife
Despite her absence from the Manhattan courtroom, Nadine Menendez made a powerful impression during Wednesday’s trial, with both prosecutors and the senator’s defense team repeatedly referencing her and her role in the bribery scheme, which prosecutors say dated back to 2018, when the pair began meet and a year after Senator Menendez’s last corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury.
Pomerantz painted her as the isolation Menendez placed between himself and his alleged benefactors, arguing that Nadine’s role as intermediary gave the senator plausible deniability.
“Menendez exercised caution when committing crimes,” she said. “He was sharp enough not to text too much. Instead, he asked Nadine to do it for him.
However, Weitzman portrayed her as a greedy manipulator who accepted gold, cash and other bribes without her husband’s knowledge. The couple had separate finances, lived separately until April 2020 and had largely lived separate lives since then, and FBI agents found all of the gold bars in her locked closet, Weitzman said.
Although the 70-year-old senator knew that his wife had gold bars, he thought it was an inheritance from her family, which had made a fortune in the Persian rug business, he added. Instead, he said, Nadine always received financial support from others, including her previous husband and wealthy family, and therefore “tried to obtain cash and assets by any means possible,” Weitzman said.
“I admit it smells a little weird,” he said of what he called “the green and gold elephant in the room.”
In addition to the gold, investigators also found more than $400,000 stuffed into envelopes, jacket pockets and shoes throughout the couple’s home. Weitzman attributed this accumulated cash to the senator’s habit – developed after his family fled Cuba in the 1950s – of withdrawing $400 to $500 each month for decades and keeping the cash at home.
Prosecutors say the riches were corrupt payments for official activities that only a senator could provide.
“Quid pro quo – this is for this purpose,” Pomerantz repeated in her opening statements.
Specifically, prosecutors accused Menendez of accepting gold, cash and “fictitious work” for Nadine Menendez from her longtime friend Hana to support Hana secure a monopoly on halal meat imports into Egypt.
“Hana didn’t really have any experience in the business, but he had a U.S. senator in his pocket,” Pomerantz said.
In return, Menendez also provided sensitive information about U.S. embassy staff in Cairo and even wrote a letter from an Egyptian official to U.S. lawmakers who held millions in military custody weapons and aid to Egypt because of concerns about human rights violations in the country, prosecutors say.
Menendez also tried to obstruct the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey’s investigation of Daibes and the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office’s investigation into fraud involving Uribe, an insurance broker warm with Hana, prosecutors say.
In return, Uribe gave Nadine $15,000 in cash in the parking lot as a down payment on the purchase of a $60,000 Mercedes Benz convertible, and then continued to make monthly payments for years, Pomerantz said.
“This was not ordinary politics. It was a profit-oriented policy,” she said. “Robert Menendez was a United States senator who was motivated by greed and focused on how much he could put into his own pocket and into his wife’s pocket.”
Weitzman insisted that prosecutors were “wrong, completely wrong.”
Menendez said he did not take bribes and never acted as a foreign agent of any government.
“Senator Menendez’s actions were actions on behalf of voters,” he said.
He added that his interactions with Egyptian and Qatari officials amounted only to “engaging in diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. government.”
Weitzman urged jurors to remember Menendez’s long history of public service. Menendez has served in the Senate since 2006, in the House from 1993 to 2006, and was previously a member of the New Jersey Legislature and Union City politics.
“He’s an American patriot,” Weitzman said.
About this motion to quash the trial
Stein rejected defense attorney Adam Fee’s argument that Pomerantz tainted the jury during her opening statements, suggesting that Menendez agreed to publicly support Qatar to support Daibes secure an investment from a member of the Qatari royal family in exchange for gold bars and cash.
Fee accused Pomerantz of violating Stein’s order requiring prosecutors not to discuss the content of the pro-Qatar resolution that Daibes allegedly encouraged Menendez to introduce to support him secure the investment.
“These are angels dancing on the head of a pin, Your Honor. They are injecting this case with these conclusions,” Fee said.
However, after a heated exchange between Fee and prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Stein denied the request for a mistrial.
“There is no basis for this,” he said.
This report was first published by the New Jersey Monitor, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors through a 501c(3) public charity that includes Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
