By Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and Nicholas Fandos
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a powerful Democrat who once led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was convicted Tuesday of participating in a vast international bribery scheme in which prosecutors said he had accepted gold, cash and other payoffs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for political favors abroad and at home.
A Manhattan jury returned the verdict after deliberating for less than three days in U.S. District Court. Menendez was found guilty on all 16 counts he faced, including bribery, honest services wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice, acting as an agent for Egypt and conspiracy.
The verdict made Menendez the first U.S. senator to be found guilty of acting as an agent of a foreign power and the seventh to be convicted of a federal crime while in office.
Menendez, 70, now faces the possibility of many years in prison when he is sentenced by the judge, Sidney Stein. Eight of the counts on which he was convicted carry potential 20-year sentences. Sentencing is set to take place Oct. 29.
The conviction will almost certainly deliver a final blow to Menendez’s storied four-decade political career and create intense pressure for him to resign before his term expires at year’s end. He had resisted calls to do so before his trial but could now face a rare expulsion vote by his Senate colleagues if he does not leave voluntarily.
The verdict comes seven years after Menendez was tried in an unrelated federal bribery case, held in New Jersey, in which a jury said it could not reach a verdict and a mistrial was declared. When Menendez was indicted in Manhattan last September, he became the first U.S. senator ever to face federal bribery charges twice.
Two businesspeople — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — were charged alongside Menendez. They were also found guilty of all counts they faced.
Although there were several defendants in the bribery trial, there was little doubt that Menendez was always the prosecutors’ primary focus. He frequently attracted federal scrutiny as he rose through New Jersey’s notoriously corrupt political circles and became one of the most powerful Latino politicians in Washington.
Soon after he was indicted, Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, said he had been singled out by prosecutors who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator.”
Throughout the trial, prosecutors presented testimony and other evidence that placed Menendez at the center of a web of corruption that intermingled sensitive matters of security in the Middle East and the bare-knuckle, backroom dealings of his home state.
Menendez was charged with steering aid and weapons to Egypt, using his clout to help the government of Qatar and propping up Hana’s lucrative halal certification business monopoly for meat sold in Egypt. Hana, in a text to an Egyptian general, referred to Menendez, who held sway over U.S. military sales, financing and other aid, as “our man.”
Prosecutors also cited evidence showing that Menendez tried to disrupt criminal investigations in New Jersey on behalf of two allies — Daibes, a real estate developer, and Jose Uribe, a former insurance broker — who helped funnel bribes to the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez.
Nadine Menendez, 57, was indicted with her husband but was not tried with him. In April, Stein postponed her trial after her lawyers said she would be undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She has pleaded not guilty.
In the scheme, Nadine Menendez was the senator’s “go-between, demanding payment, receiving payment and passing messages, but always — always — keeping him informed,” a prosecutor, Paul Monteleoni, said in a closing argument.
“It wasn’t enough for him to be one of the most powerful people in Washington,” Monteleoni told the jury. “No, Robert Menendez wanted all that power, but he also wanted to use it to pile up riches for himself and his wife.
“So Menendez sold the power of his office,” Monteleoni added.
When the FBI raided the Menendezes’ home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in June 2022, agents found bars of gold bullion worth more than $100,000 and about $480,000 in cash, the evidence showed. They also found, parked in the driveway, a 2019 Mercedes-Benz convertible Uribe had given to Nadine Menendez.
In the trial’s first week, a prosecutor handed the jurors bags containing gold bars to hold and feel — the jury’s first tangible exposure to items prosecutors said were part of the bribes paid to the couple.
Menendez has proclaimed his innocence ever since he was charged. In January, he delivered a defiant speech on the floor of the Senate, calling the case against him “baseless” and saying it had set a dangerous precedent that could be used against other senators. He suggested prosecutors could make it a crime to advocate for a foreign government to buy U.S. aircraft or agricultural goods.
The senator’s lawyers signaled their trial strategy during opening statements when one of them, Avi Weitzman, sought to shift blame for the senator’s troubles to his wife. He cast her as an opportunist in dire financial straits who had kept her husband “in the dark” about what she was asking others to give her and who “tried to get cash and assets any which way she could.”
The tactic proved fruitful when the government’s first witness, an FBI agent, testified that during the search of the couple’s home, a blue blazer belonging to the senator had been found hanging in Nadine Menendez’s closet, which she had kept locked and where the gold had also been seized.
But the agent retracted his testimony the next day under a vigorous cross-examination by Adam Fee, another of the senator’s lawyers, and agreed that the jacket had been found outside the closet, thus distancing the senator from the place where the gold had been stored.
Fee, in a closing argument, told jurors that the government’s case had been based on half-truths, factual leaps, unsupported inference and guesses.
“The gaps you are being asked to fill are not based on evidence,” Fee said.
At his last bribery trial, in 2017, two of Menendez’s colleagues — Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — testified as character witnesses on his behalf. “He’s a very honest, trustworthy man,” Graham told the jury in that trial.
This time, none of Menendez’s colleagues were called to testify. Booker, a longtime ally, has called for Menendez to resign.
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