July 16, 2024
Kevin R. Wexler/NorthJersey.com via USA TODAY NETWORK
U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, of New Jersey, was found guilty of all charges at his federal corruption trial. The Democrat, shown above walking to the New York courthouse in May at the start of his trial, took bribes paid in cash, luxury cars and gold bars
Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted Tuesday of taking bribes to do favors for Egypt and Qatar and to meddle in two criminal cases to help three New Jersey businessmen.
The jury’s verdict came on the third day of deliberations and after a nine-week trial at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. It makes Menendez just the seventh sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of a federal crime.
RELATED: Corruption trial for Nadine Menendez, wife of Sen. Bob Menendez, postponed indefinitely
Two codefendants who stood trial with the senator — businessmen Fred Daibes and Wael Hana — were also convicted.
Federal prosecutors in New York first indicted Menendez, his wife Nadine, Hana, Daibes, and Jose Uribe in September.
They charged the senator then and in several subsequent superseding indictments with bribery, extortion, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and acting as a foreign agent for offenses they say occurred between 2018 and last year.
Hana is an Egyptian immigrant who prosecutors say bribed the senator with gold bars and cash, paid his wife’s mortgage, and gave her a no-show job at his halal meat company. In exchange, Menendez steered military aid and arms to Egypt, gave information about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to Egyptian officials, ghost-wrote a letter for Egyptian officials to influence his Senate colleagues, and otherwise helped the Egyptian government, which had given Hana’s company a monopoly on halal meat imports.
Daibes is a real estate developer and bank founder in Edgewater who prosecutors accused of bribing Menendez with gold bars and cash to interfere in a federal bank fraud case he faced and to publicly support the Qatari government so that a company owned by a Qatari royal would invest in one of Daibes’ developments.
Menendez was chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the scheme. He surrendered his leadership role shortly after his indictment, although he remains on the committee.
Prosecutors say Nadine Menendez acted as an intermediary in many of the schemes and charged her too, but Stein postponed her trial to August after she disclosed last spring she had breast cancer and needed medical treatment.
Uribe pleaded guilty in March in a cooperation deal. He testified during the trial that he paid Nadine Menendez almost $50,000 over three years for a new Mercedes-Benz convertible to replace one she wrecked in December 2018 when she hit and killed a pedestrian. In return, he wanted Menendez to help kill the prosecution of a friend and stop the New Jersey attorney general’s related expanding insurance fraud investigation that threatened to ensnare his own company. He told jurors Menendez told him, “I saved your little a**, not once but twice.”
Jurors learned that FBI agents found more than $500,000 in cash, 13 gold bars, and other riches in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home and his wife’s bank safe deposit box during a June 2022 search. Prosecutors brought some of the cash and gold bars to court and passed them around the jury box for inspection.
Prosecutors added the obstruction of justice charges in March, accusing the senator and his wife of trying to conceal the bribery scheme by mischaracterizing the car and mortgage payments as loans, repaying Hana and Uribe $44,000, and causing their attorneys to lie to authorities.
This was Menendez’s second corruption trial in seven years. His first, where he also was accused of trading his influence for gifts, ended in a mistrial in November 2017 after the jury deliberated four days and deadlocked.
Menendez resisted calls to resign after his indictment and last month filed to run for reelection in November as an independent candidate. Rep. Andy Kim (D-03) is seeking to succeed Menendez and will face Republican Curtis Bashaw in the fall.
Federal bribery law requires jurors to find that a public official accepted something of value in exchange for taking or agreeing to take an official action, with a corrupt intent. It doesn’t require the official to have taken the action; a promise to act is enough.
Menendez has 14 days to file a notice of appeal once the judge files his entry of judgment, which typically happens within days of the verdict.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.
