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For the last nine weeks, the usually subdued ambience of Manhattan federal courthouse has been broken early each morning by a man defiantly launching into song.
Staring over at the Brooklyn Bridge from the 23rd floor, embattled senator Robert Menendez has serenaded those outside his corruption trial with renditions of Josh Groban’s uplifting 2003 hit “You Raise Me Up” and a host of show tunes.
According to one lawyer who has attended every day of the trial against the New Jersey Democrat and two co-defendants, the Groban track is one of Menedez’s go-tos.
The lyrics include the rousing chorus: “You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains, You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas, I am strong, when I am on your shoulders, You raise me up to more than I can be.”
Menendez even carries the tune into Judge Sidney Stein’s courtroom, singing under his breath in a deep baritone as his legal team settles around him.
But it will likely take more than rousing lyrics to save him as the jury of six men and six women — among them bankers, doctors and artists from New York City and Westchester County — prepare to sort through the evidence laid out by federal prosecutors. They are expected to begin deliberations today.
Menendez is charged with 16 felony counts of corruption, bribery, obstruction of justice and conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt and Qatar.
If convicted, the 70-year-old lawyer and politician faces expulsion from the Senate and decades in prison.
This is the second time Menendez has been tried for bribery. In the previous case — a lurid corruption plot involving a bizarre set of characters — he was accused of taking lavish gifts from a fraudster doctor in exchange for, among other things, securing visas for a harem of young women from around the world. That case resulted in a mistrial in 2017.
Today, he is accused of conspiring with his glamorous blonde wife to secure “envelope after envelope” of cash and gold bars in an elaborate bribery scheme — “corruption on a massive scale,” said a prosecutor — that took place between 2018 and 2022.
“He put his power up for sale,” said prosecutor Paul Monteleoni in closing arguments that stretched over more than six hours over two days this week.
The gold and nearly $500,000 in cash was found stuffed into suit jacket pockets, bags and even hiking boots in a raid on the Englewood Cliffs residence Menendez shares with Nadine Arslanian, who he married in 2020.
The loot is evidence of a “clear pattern of corruption” in which Menendez and Arslanian, 57, helped two New Jersey businessmen — Fred Daibes and Wael Hana — secure multimillion-dollar deals in an elaborate quid pro quo, Monteleoni said.
Menendez and Arslanian also accepted a $60,000 Mercedes convertible from an insurance executive who needed the senator’s help to quash a criminal investigation in New Jersey.
Jose Uribe, who had been charged alongside Menendez, Hana, Daibes and Arslanian, pleaded guilty to bribery and became the prosecution’s star witness.
Menendez and the other defendants have vigorously denied the charges.
In some of the most dramatic moments at the trial — where lawyers often outnumbered reporters in the public gallery — Uribe described a sprawling bribery scheme that began when Hana suggested he reach out to Arslanian to seek the senator’s help when two associates in the trucking business were facing criminal fraud charges, according to prosecutors.
Arslanian acted as the “go-between,” fielding texts and setting up meetings with the senator, Uribe said. One of those meetings took place in the backyard of Menendez’s Englewood Cliffs backyard over tumblers of Grand Marnier and cigars in September 2019, he said.
“Menendez was in charge,” Monteleoni told the court. “His wife Nadine was his go-between.”
In a curious detail that was the subject of intense scrutiny by defense attorneys, Uribe told the court at the backyard meeting Menendez called out “mon amour” and used a bell to summon his wife, who brought out a piece of paper for Uribe to write down the names of the trucking company executives who were the subject of a criminal probe that threatened to embroil his own company.
“I am looking for the perfect bell,” Arslanian texted Daibes a month before the encounter. “I have not found it, but I will.”
Prosecutors argued that the bell was emblematic of her role in the corruption scheme as was their penchant for keeping close track of each other, using the Find My Friends location-tracking feature on their iPhones.
Defense attorneys argued Menendez was simply worried about Arslanian, who was allegedly being stalked by an ex-boyfriend. Her trial is separate and set to begin in August, following treatments for breast cancer.
Shortly after the backyard meeting, Menendez summoned Gurbir Grewal, New Jersey’s then attorney general, to his Newark office to discuss the case. Grewal told the court he cut the senator off before he could continue.
In other gripping testimony, New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor testified that Menendez asked him to “look carefully” at a case involving Daibes, a longtime friend of the senator’s who had been charged with bank fraud in 2018.
Philip Sellinger was in line to become US Attorney at the time of the December 2020 meeting in Washington, and Menendez had indicated that he would recommend him for the top federal prosecutor’s job, according to testimony.
“I said to him that if I became US attorney, I would look at all cases carefully, but I want him to know that I had this prior representation of developers in a case that was adverse to Mr. Daibes,” Sellinger said, adding that it “might lead to my potentially being recused or removed from any case in the US Attorney’s office” that involved Daibes.
Within hours of Sellinger’s disclosure Menendez asked a staffer to begin vetting another candidate to be US Attorney for New Jersey, prosecutors said.
Daibes showered the couple with gold bars — including at least four weighing one-kilo (2.2lbs), each valued at nearly $60,000 — as well as tens of thousands in cash, prosecutors said.
They added Daibes’ fingerprints and DNA were found on some of the envelopes of cash and Menendez’s own fingerprints were on one of the envelopes, according to Monteleoni.
Prosecutors also alleged Menendez, who was head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations until he was forced to resign after he was charged with numerous felonies last year, had introduced Daibes to Qatari royals to help him secure a $95 million investment on a real estate deal in New Jersey.
When the senator stepped in to help Hana secure a lucrative deal to certify halal products to Egypt, Hana gave Arslanian a $10,000 per month no-show job at his company, prosecutors said, adding that the senator himself made the call to a high-ranking official at the US Department of Agriculture on Hana’s behalf.
“Menendez’s call was the only time, the only time he had ever gotten a call from a member of Congress advocating for a constituent at the expense of the United States,” Monteleoni told the packed courtroom earlier this week, which included Alicia Menendez, the senator’s daughter, who is an MSNBC anchor.
In March 2018, Arslanian and Hana arranged a meeting between Menendez and Egyptian officials in Menendez’s Senate office to discuss US military financing to Egypt, which had been blocked over concerns over the Middle Eastern country’s record on human rights.
Prosecutors say Menendez “ghost-wrote” letters on behalf of Egyptian officials to help them obtain tens of millions in military aid, and to secure Arslanian’s revenue stream.
“When Menendez knows that Nadine is going to get paid, he springs into action again and again,” Monteleoni said.
But Menendez’s attorneys argued Arslanian kept her husband in the dark about the cash she was receiving from Daibes and Hana to help her pay her mortgage and secure the Mercedes after she lost her own car in an accident that resulted in the death of a pedestrian in 2018.
The government failed to prove its corruption case against the senator, said defense attorney Adam Fee, calling the evidence they presented to the jury — hundreds of pages of photos, text and phone conversations and graphs showing alleged collusion among the defendants — “painfully thin.”
“This case, it dies here today,” continued Fee in closing arguments Wednesday. “Because they have failed to prove that very high standard that Bob’s actions were anything other than what we want our elected officials to do.”
Fee said the gold and cash found in the couple’s residence were gifts to Arslanian from Daibes, a generous friend who was helping a struggling divorcee who was too embarrassed to tell Menendez she was having trouble paying her mortgage and needed help with car payments.
“The evidence you’ve seen just in this case strongly supports the inference that Fred Daibes, because he was so generous, was just giving Nadine stuff,” said Fee.
As for Menendez — when he wasn’t singing — the ardent fan of Broadway musicals, who had proposed to Arslanian in 2019 with a song from the Greatest Showman, spent the trial studiously taking notes and conferring with his attorneys.
“The government is intoxicated with their own rhetoric,” he told reporters as he stepped inside a waiting black Lincoln sedan earlier this week.