Jury selection begins in Sen. Bob Menedez trial

NEW YORK – Jury selection began Monday in the federal corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars in exchange for political favors at home and abroad.

By the end of the day, no jurors had been selected for the trial, which is taking place in Manhattan and is likely to last until about the Fourth of July.

Menendez has represented New Jersey in Congress for three decades, but the corruption case was brought by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. The jurors who will be asked to weigh the evidence against him and two New Jersey business owners, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, will be from Manhattan, the Bronx or several counties north of New York City.

All three men have pleaded not guilty.

At 7:30 a.m., reporters and prospective jurors carrying blue summons envelopes lined up outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse waiting for the doors to open to the public.

Inside the courthouse, just before 8:30 a.m., Menendez walked through security, wearing a dark blue suit and striped red tie, his Senate pin visible on his lapel. He greeted court officers with a smile as he passed through the metal detector.

Two hours later, he stood facing scores of prospective jurors as they filed into a wood-paneled courtroom. He appeared relaxed as the proceeding continued, leaning back in a chair with hands clasped either at his waist or near his chest.

Menendez, 70, and the two business owners sat quietly talking with their lawyers while the judge, Sidney H. Stein, spent most of the day off the bench, questioning prospective jurors who had said that they would be unable to serve for the duration of the trial; roughly three dozen would-be jurors were dismissed after an initial screening by the judge, and an additional 50 people were called into the room.

The questioning is likely to continue Tuesday, perhaps pushing the lawyers’ opening statements to Wednesday.

Menendez has said that he expects to be exonerated and has left open the possibility of running for re-election in November.

“I appreciate the jury’s sacrifice, their time and commitment,” Menendez said after leaving the courtroom for the day.

He and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were charged in a September 2023 indictment with being at the center of a bribery scheme that lasted for nearly five years.

Menendez, the former chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is accused of steering government aid and weapons to Egypt, helping Hana’s company win a lucrative monopoly and meddling in criminal investigations in New Jersey on behalf of his allies.

In return, prosecutors have said, the senator and his wife accepted a Mercedes-Benz convertible, home mortgage payments, a low- or no-show job for Nadine Menendez, cash and gold bars. Investigators who searched their home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in June 2022 discovered much of the cash stashed in coat pockets, boots and a safe.

Nadine Menendez, 57, will be tried separately, in July. Her lawyers have said that she was recently diagnosed with a serious medical condition that will require surgery and, possibly, follow-up treatment and a lengthy period of recovery. She did not attend the first day of jury selection.

The jurors, seated eight to a row, wore a sea of colors and patterns – oranges and greens, plaids and stripes – that contrasted sharply with the staid blue and black suits of the defendants and their lawyers.

Stein began by thanking them for their service, acknowledging the strain that a lengthy trial, in the middle of the summer, might cause. He cited John Adams, the second president of the United States who helped write the Declaration of Independence and also worked as a lawyer.

“John Adams wrote that representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty,” Stein told the potential jurors. “I firmly believe that, and if you are chosen to serve as a juror on this trial, you will be part of that more than 250-year tradition.”

The trial is expected to last six or seven weeks, but could run longer.

“Trials in reality are not run the way they are on television,” Stein said. “Things cannot be foreseen exactly.”

A jury consultant, Justin Kelly, sat at the defense table with Menendez’s legal team. His firm, DOAR, was paid $150,000 for legal services in March by Menendez’s Senate campaign account, federal spending reports show.

This is the second time in seven years that Menendez has been on trial after being charged with public corruption.

The first trial, in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, ended with a hung jury in November 2017. A judge then dismissed several of the charges, and prosecutors later dismissed the rest of the charges in January 2018.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.