Sen. Menendez convicted of bribery, other charges in corruption trial

NEW YORK - Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted Tuesday of taking bribes from three businessmen who showered him and his wife with cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, an extravagant bounty for his help securing deals with foreign officials and trying to derail several criminal investigations in New Jersey.

The jury in Manhattan federal court found the once-powerful New Jersey lawmaker guilty on multiple felony counts. They include bribery, extortion, wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt from 2018 to 2022, when Menendez was at the height of his influence in Washington, serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or as the panel’s top Democrat while his party was in the minority.

The two co-defendants in the trial, real estate developer Fred Daibes and businessman Wael “Will” Hana, were also convicted.

Menendez did not testify in his own defense. His team is expected to appeal, and legal experts say he could be helped by the Supreme Court’s rulings in recent years narrowing the scope of federal bribery laws.

But the 70-year-old senator’s political downfall is essentially complete. New Jersey Democrats abandoned him after his indictment. He declined to seek the party’s nomination for a fourth term and instead mounted a long-shot bid as an independent in a state where Democrats have held both U.S. Senate seats for more than 50 years.

Rep. Andy Kim, a national security expert in the House, won the Democratic primary to succeed Menendez last month and will face Republican Curtis Bashaw, a hotelier, in the November election. Menendez could serve out the rest of his term even after his conviction, though his colleagues could vote to expel him if he does not resign. If Menendez loses his seat, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) would appoint an interim senator to serve into January.

Menendez, who beat a different set of corruption charges in New Jersey federal court in 2017, has been on trial in Manhattan for two months. Jurors heard witnesses describe how the longtime lawmaker had waded into a world of Egyptian spies and international intrigue after falling in love with a divorcée he met at his local pancake house.

Nadine Arslanian lavished Menendez with praise after they started dating in early 2018 - and often paired her compliments with requests that he meet with Egyptian intelligence officials or New Jersey business executives, according to hundreds of text messages, bank records and other documents shown to the jury.

She had expensive tastes in cars and clothes, but she couldn’t keep up with her mortgage. Attorneys for the senator portrayed her as a scheming girlfriend who kept seeing an ex-boyfriend even after she began dating Menendez and as a secretive wife who never told him she was receiving gold bars and money from several men.

Menendez attorney Adam Fee told the jury in his closing argument that Arslanian - who has gone by Nadine Menendez since their marriage in 2020 - would lie to those men about things the senator said or did, to get them to pay up. “There are times when Nadine invokes Bob’s name to get people to do stuff. Period,” he said.

Nadine Menendez was also charged in the indictment but the judge has not set her trial date. She did not attend her husband’s trial because it coincided with her treatment for advanced breast cancer.

Witnesses testified that Bob Menendez, a fixture of New Jersey politics since his days on the Union City school board five decades ago, changed after Arslanian entered his life. His longtime political strategist, a top foreign policy adviser in the Senate and a close friend who became the U.S. attorney in New Jersey all described for the jury how they were puzzled by his moves.

One businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty this year and testified at the trial that he bribed Menendez with a Mercedes-Benz convertible for Arslanian in exchange for anything the powerful lawmaker could do to stop a pair of state insurance fraud investigations into Uribe’s close associates.

Menendez tried to go to bat for Uribe twice in 2019, first in a phone call and then a meeting with New Jersey’s attorney general at the time, Gurbir S. Grewal, who testified that he rebuffed the senator instantly on both occasions. Still, Menendez gave Uribe the impression that his efforts had worked.

In turn, the businessman testified, he kept making payments on the Mercedes-Benz for three years.

Daibes, one of the trial co-defendants, did not contest that gold bullion from his personal inventory was found at the Menendez home or that his fingerprints and DNA were on cash-filled envelopes. Hana did not deny that other gold bars and gifts came from him. Attorneys for both men argued that those were tokens of friendship, not bribes.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York hammered the senator as the caricature of a corrupt politician. They accused him of selling his power and influence for the ingots, luxury car and hundreds of thousands of dollars that FBI agents, during a 2022 search, found spilling out of bags and jackets, stuffed in a brown boot and locked in a safe in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., home.

Hana covered a $23,000 mortgage payment on that home in 2019, saving it from foreclosure before the senator moved in. He cut three checks to Arslanian, each of them for $10,000, which he argued were legitimate consulting fees.

Daibes, prosecutors said, provided a steady stream of cash-filled envelopes marked “$10,000” and at least four one-kilogram ingots, along with smaller, one-ounce bars.

The Menendezes were accused of taking more mundane bribes, too: an air purifier, recliner chair and elliptical exercise machine.

“Menendez was entrusted with oversight of our nation’s foreign policy and all the powers that come with it, and he sold all of that trust and all of that power,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni said during closing arguments. Daibes and Hana, he said, “were all too willing to pay.”

He derided defense arguments that Menendez and his wife innocently collected years’ worth of generous gifts. “Friends do not give friends envelopes stuffed with $10,000 in cash, just out of friendship,” Monteleoni said. “Friends do not give those same friends kilogram bars of gold worth $60,000 each out of the goodness of their hearts.”

The trial revealed how Egyptian officials enriched Hana after Menendez started providing them unclassified insider information and pushing to get the country $300 million in U.S. military aid that was held up in Congress over concerns with Egypt’s human rights record.

In 2019, the Egyptian government granted Hana an exclusive contract to certify beef exports to that country as complying with halal religious rules - though Hana, a Coptic Christian, had no experience with Muslim slaughterhouse rites. U.S. agriculture officials warned that the move would destabilize a thriving trade sector, because the Egyptians abruptly deauthorized the other U.S. businesses that had been certifying exports for years.

Menendez called the U.S. undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs, demanding his staff acquiesce to the Egyptian government’s decision in favor of Hana’s New Jersey company, IS EG Halal Certified Inc. That official, Ted McKinney, said he was stunned by Menendez’s curt request: “Stop interfering with my constituent.”

The senator also sent the Egyptians what prosecutors called sensitive, nonpublic data on staff levels and nationalities at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and provided other information the Egyptians said they were grateful to receive. A $99 million sale of tank ammunition to Egypt would get his sign-off, Menendez said in a message for Hana that was relayed to the Egyptians in 2018. A ban on small arms sales was about to be lifted by the State Department, the senator conveyed in another message.

When the head of Egypt’s intelligence directorate, Maj. Gen. Abbas Kamel, was arriving in Washington for a visit in 2021, Menendez tipped off his team to a sensitive issue: A group of senators planned to ask the general about reports that a team of Saudis had stopped in Egypt to pick up drugs that they used to kill Washington Post contributing columnist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime, while he was in Istanbul in 2018.

Closer to home, Menendez intervened after Daibes was indicted in a 2018 bank fraud case. The senator complained in 2020 to Philip Sellinger, a close friend of his, that Daibes was being treated unfairly. Sellinger, who was being vetted for the job of U.S. attorney in New Jersey, told Menendez he might need to be recused from the case - and their years of dinners and golf outings soon came to an end.

Prosecutors said Daibes also asked Menendez for help getting approval of a Senate resolution expressing support for Qatar, at a time when a member of that country’s royal family was considering an investment in a luxury real estate project that Daibes was planning in Edgewater, N.J. Menendez, who had introduced the real estate developer to the Qataris, texted Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim al-Thani to put in a good word for the deal. Al-Thani’s investment fund, Heritage Advisors, approved $95 million for the project.

Text messages showed how Menendez put Arslanian in touch with a childhood friend of his, whose law firm would set up the company she used to collect checks from Hana’s business. When the checks were late and she grew frustrated, Menendez counseled her not to put it in writing, at one point telling her, “No, you should not text or email.”

Menendez had been on federal prosecutors’ radar since he entered the Senate in 2006, when the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office investigated a nonprofit that was collecting federal grants and paid $300,000 over nine years to rent office space in a house Menendez owned. Prosecutors said in a 2011 letter to Menendez that they had closed the probe and would not be filing charges.

Menendez’s earlier trial on a different set of bribery allegations ended with a hung jury in 2017, and the case against him fell apart. Within months, he began dating Arslanian.