New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez was found guilty Tuesday of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes — including 1-kilogram gold bars — in exchange for using his powerful post to enrich and protect three businessmen and the Egyptian and Qatari governments.
The bombshell jury verdict — guilty on all 18 counts — was delivered in Manhattan federal court after about 12½ hours of deliberations spread over three days.
It capped a nine-week trial that revealed how the senator leveraged his position as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to cater to the whims of men who showered him and his wife with gold, cash and gifts including a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
“Mr. Menendez sold the power of his office,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told jurors in the government’s closing statement.
“It wasn’t enough for him to be one of the most powerful people in Washington,” Monteleoni said. “It wasn’t enough for him to be entrusted by the public with the power to approve billions of dollars of US military aid to foreign countries.
“Robert Menendez wanted all that power — but he also wanted to use it to pile up riches for himself and his wife.”
Menendez’s conviction will add fuel to calls for the three-term senator — who has proclaimed his innocence and claimed he was targeted because he’s a prominent Latino — to resign from Congress.
His indictment last September took a political toll. Menendez was trounced in June’s Democratic primary by Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) and has announced plans to run in November’s general election as an independent candidate instead.
He was charged with 16 different felonies, including bribery, extortion, obstructing justice and acting as an illegal foreign agent, with the top counts carrying a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
His attorneys tried to poke holes in the government’s case by arguing that Menendez’s “beautiful, tall” wife Nadine had “kept him in the dark” about what she was asking co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes to give her.
But Manhattan federal prosecutors detailed a dizzying array of actions Menendez took between 2018 and 2022 on behalf of his cronies, including a disgraced New Jersey insurance broker who bought Nadine a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 in exchange for help scuttling state criminal probes.
“I saved your ass, not once but twice,” the Garden State pol bragged to Jose Uribe — who pleaded guilty and flipped on Menendez— during an August 2020 dinner at the north Jersey restaurant Segovia, Uribe testified.
“Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” Nadine Menendez texted her husband after receiving the first payment toward the new car, using the French phrase for “love of my life.” She added a heart emoji at the end of the message.
Uribe told Menendez the name of a man being probed by state authorities, and the morning after, Menendez pressured New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to speak about the active criminal probe, Grewal testified.
“Whoa, that was gross,” Grewal’s deputy said after the September 2019 meeting in the senator’s Newark office, trial testimony revealed.
Hana, a businessman, also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and gold to the senator while Menendez did favors for Egypt including ghostwriting a letter asking the US to unfreeze $300 million in military aid that had been held up due to human rights concerns, prosecutors said.
Menendez also leaned on an Agriculture Department official to protect Hana’s lucrative monopoly on approving halal meat exports to Egypt, evidence revealed.
In exchange, Hana gave Nadine Menendez a no-show job worth $120,000-per-year, prosecutors said.
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Nadine told an Egyptian official while the senator smoked cigars and swigged red wine during a May 2019 meeting at Morton’s Steakhouse, an FBI agent who secretly observed the scene testified.
The senator also traded gold bars and cash for trying to meddle in a federal bank fraud case against Daibes and setting up a meeting between the real estate mogul and a member of the Qatari ruling family, prosecutors said.
Gold bars in the Menendezes’ safe had serial numbers tracing them to Daibes, while envelopes of cash bore fingerprints tying them to both him and Hana, trial evidence showed.
Menendez’s attorneys claimed the feds tried to dazzle jurors with the gold and cash found in their client’s home to overcompensate for a “thin” case relying on scant evidence that the senator had taken “official acts” in exchange for the bribes.
“The core of this case is hollow,” Menendez’s lawyer Adam Fee said in his closing statement.
He called the prosecutors “overzealous” and claimed that Menendez’s actions were, in fact, “exactly what we want our elected officials to do.”
The defense called three witnesses, including the senator’s older sister, who testified that Menendez’s decades-long habit of stashing cash for was part of a “normal” distrust of banks stemming from his Cuban heritage.
“It’s a Cuban thing,” Caridad Gonzalez testified.
Nadine Menendez, 57, is slated to go on trial separately from her husband after her case was delayed until later this year while she recovers from breast cancer.
The trial was Bob Menendez’s second time facing federal corruption charges.
An earlier case in which the senator was charged with accepting lavish bribes — including all-expense-paid vacations and private flights — in exchange for doling out favors to a Palm Beach doctor ended in a mistrial in 2017.
Unlike in this trial, which unfolded in Manhattan, the earlier case was brought by prosecutors in the senator’s home state of New Jersey.