Federal prosecutors have tried to bamboozle Manhattan jurors by focusing on the gold bars and cash found in Sen. Bob Menendez’s New Jersey home, defense attorneys claimed Wednesday near the end of the embattled pol’s months-long trial.
Adam Fee, a lawyer for the three-term Democrat, argued the feds were trying to distract the jury from “painfully thin” evidence in the case accusing Menendez, 70, of rewarding cronies with “official” favors in exchange for bribes.
“This case, it dies here today,” Fee proclaimed during a nearly six-hour closing statement that stretched over two days in Manhattan federal court.
Prosecutors “have failed to prove that very high standard that Bob’s actions were anything other than exactly what we want our elected officials to do,” Fee added.
Over the nine-week trial, jurors were shown a mountain of evidence allegedly tying hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold bullion and cash discovered in the senator’s home — and the new Mercedes-Benz parked in his garage — to a disgraced insurance broker and two other New Jersey businessmen who dined with Menendez and texted with his wife Nadine.
But Fee argued the government failed to prove that the cash the FBI found stuffed into envelopes, including inside the pockets of the senator’s official congressional jacket, and the one-kilo gold bars recovered in his wife’s safe were illegal bribes.
“The core of this case is hollow,” Fee said, calling the prosecutors “overzealous” and adding that “the inferences that they are asking you to adopt are unreliable.”
Jurors could begin deliberating as soon as Thursday over whether to convict Menendez on a dizzying array of charges that he wielded his influence as head of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee to enrich and protect the men who sent him gold bars, cash and other goodies.
Menendez is also charged with illegally acting as a foreign agent of Egypt and Qatar and obstructing justice.
“This is a big case, but it all boils down to a classic case of corruption on a massive scale,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni said in a closing statement Tuesday.
Among the allegations is that Menendez leaned on an Agriculture Department official to protect his co-defendant Wael Hana’s lucrative monopoly on approving halal meat exports to Egypt — which Hana had been given despite no prior experience with halal meat.
In exchange, Hana gave Nadine Menendez a no-show job worth $120,000-per-year, prosecutors said.
But Hana’s lawyer Lawrence Lustberg, in his own closing statement Wednesday afternoon, argued that Hana’s halal monopoly was merely the result of “hard work, and good contacts” — while denying that anything Hana gave to the senator led to an “official” act.
“What we have here is an American success story,” Lustberg said.
A lawyer for a third co-defendant, real estate mogul Fred Daibes, began his closing statement Wednesday afternoon, and is set to finish Thursday morning.
Prosecutors will then deliver a rebuttal, before jurors get their instructions and begin deliberations.
Menendez faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the top counts he’s facing.
He’s maintained his innocence and announced plans to run for re-election as an independent this fall after being trounced in June’s Democratic primary by Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ).