A jury began deliberating Friday afternoon in Sen. Bob Menendez's bribery trial following four days of closing arguments in which prosecutors accused the New Jersey Democrat of "corruption on a massive scale," delivering favors for businessmen who showered him and his wife with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold.
Menendez's attorney maintained the evidence showed only that the three-term senator had advocated for his constituents. "He was doing his job, and he was doing it well," his lawyer Adam Fee told the jury.
Asked on his way into the federal courthouse in New York on Friday morning how he felt about the jury getting the case, Menendez said, “I love it.”
The jury got the case shortly after 2 p.m. ET Friday, following lengthy charging instructions from U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein.
The final phase of the criminal trial — Menendez's second since 2015 — follows eight weeks of testimony from 34 witnesses, but not from the senator himself. He opted not to testify in his own defense, as was his right.
Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the corruption charges, which include bribery, wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. His wife and two businessmen were also charged in the case and have pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors have alleged that bribes in the form of gold bars and roughly $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes, hidden in clothing, closets and a safe were uncovered during a raid of Menendez’s New Jersey home in 2022. Another $70,000 was found in his wife's safety deposit box, they said.
The alleged bribes were paid by three businessmen from 2018 to 2022 in exchange for official acts from Menendez as senator, according to prosecutors.
"Robert Menendez, the senior U.S. senator from the state of New Jersey, the ranking member and then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put his power up for sale," prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told jurors in his closing arguments Monday.
Two of the businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — are standing trial with Menendez, after the third, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in a deal with prosecutors. The trial of Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, was postponed after she had surgery related to a breast cancer diagnosis.
Menendez’s defense team rested its case on July 3 after calling five witnesses, less than a week after prosecutors rested their case, which included testimony from 29 witnesses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz argued in her opening statement at the start of the trial in May that Menendez had abused his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to “put greed first."
Menendez attorney Fee told jurors in his closings that his client's actions were "lawful" and "normal," and that the evidence against his client was "painfully thin."
“Prosecutors have not come close to meeting their burden … that the cash or gold was given as a bribe,” Fee said.
Menendez is accused of providing favors that included aiding Egyptian officials who allegedly granted Hana's company, IS EG Halal, a monopoly as the solo halal certifier on U.S. food exported to Egypt in return for the senator's influence.
The monopoly led to increased costs for some U.S. meat suppliers, prosecutors said, alleging that Menendez was asked during a meeting in 2019 with his wife, Hana and an Egyptian intelligence official to counter the U.S. Department of Agriculture's objections to the monopoly.
Ted McKinney, a former under secretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs, testified in court about a 2019 phone call he had with Menendez, saying the senator urged him to stop “interfering” with his constituent. McKinney recalled that “it was the first time I’d ever had a call that we thought would clearly harm elements of the U.S. food and ag industry.”
Menendez is also accused of making favorable statements about Qatar to help Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company tied to the country in exchange for gold bars and cash.
Uribe, a key government witness in the case, testified that he had sought the senator’s help to keep at bay a criminal probe by the New Jersey attorney general’s office into his associates and that he had bribed Menendez by providing his wife a Mercedes-Benz. The senator called then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to discuss the matter, according to prosecutors.
Defense lawyers have claimed that the gold bars uncovered during the 2022 raid belonged to Menendez's wife and that his family was accustomed to stashing money at home.
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Menendez has also argued through his lawyers that his wife kept him unaware of her financial difficulties and that he had not acted illegally. The Menendezes began dating in 2018 and married in 2020.
The prosecution's final witness, FBI forensic accountant Megan Rafferty, testified that gold bars found in the couple's home were either from Daibes' inventory, or linked to the same packaging as bars purchased by Hana.
The senator's sister, Caridad Gonzalez, and Nadine’s sister, Katia Tabourian, testified as witnesses for the defense.
Gonzalez, who grew up in Cuba, told the jury that after moving to the United States their father discouraged them from trusting banks and that she was not surprised when in the mid-1980s her brother asked her to grab $500 from a shoe box in a bedroom closet.
"It was normal. It’s a Cuban thing," she said.
Tabourian testified that the cash and gold had been given to her and Nadine Menendez by their parents and grandmother as gifts. Defense attorneys provided a handwritten “inventory list” drafted by their father in which “3 kilos of gold bars” were listed. The list dated to 1976 and did not include serial numbers or bank names for the gold bars.
She also testified that she’d seen gold in Nadine’s house dating back “years and years” but did not know if it was the same gold seized by the FBI.
Prosecutors noted that some of the envelopes of cash in the Menendezes' home had Daibes' fingerprints, while others had associates of Hana's. Monteleone told jurors that Menendez was "desperately trying to pass the buck" for the money found in the house. "The thousands and thousands of bucks stop here," he said.
Menendez, 70, who has served in the Senate since 2006, stepped down as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee shortly after he was indicted in September but has resisted calls to resign.
Last month he filed to run for re-election as an independent. He will face Rep. Andy Kim, the Democratic nominee, and Republican Curtis Bashaw.
