MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York federal judge on Monday denied Senator Bob Menendez’s bid to suppress certain pieces of evidence obtained through search warrants, rejecting the Democrat senator’s claims that the warrants executed on his home were unconstitutional.
The 70-year-old senator faces a criminal trial in May on accusations that he covertly aided Egypt’s authoritarian government and tried to foil a friend’s criminal prosecution in exchange for gold bars and cash.
U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein ruled in an 18-page opinion that warrants used to conduct 2022 searches of the Democrat’s email accounts and his home were properly sought and carried out.
When investigators searched the senator's New Jersey home last year, they found $100,000 worth of solid gold bars and about $480,000 in cash, as well as home furnishings and a luxury vehicle paid for by a pair of businessmen named as co-defendants in his criminal corruption complaint.
In a motion to suppress evidence as unconstitutional, Menendez’s lawyers said investigators omitted additional exculpatory information that the FBI learned before applying for one of the warrants.
Defense attorneys for Menendez also claimed other warrants authorizing an electronic search of digital devices — including his cell phone, multiple email accounts and his iCloud account — were overbroad and “riddled with material misrepresentation and omissions that deceived the authorizing magistrate judge.”
Judge Stein found Monday any such omissions in the warrants were not intentional nor material and saw no need for an additional hearing.
The Clinton-appointed federal judge also denied challenges to search warrants by Wael Hana, one of three businessmen charged in the case that also resulted in the arrest of Menendez’s wife.
The warrants were issued between January and July 2022, along with a final warrant pertaining to cellular phones last September.
Menendez has pleaded not guilty and claimed the cash bundles found in his home, several of which investigators say they found stuffed in clothing, were personal savings he had stashed for emergencies.
After his arrest last fall Menendez was forced to relinquish his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but has refused to resign from Congress.
Last week one of Menendez’s co-defendants, Jose Uribe, entered a guilty plea as part of a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. Uribe, a former insurance broker, pleaded guilty to all seven counts of superseding indictment, including conspiracy to commit bribery, honest services wire fraud and obstruction of justice.
He was accused of giving Nadine Menendez, the senator’s wife and co-defendant, a Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for her husband’s efforts to thwart an insurance fraud probe against the businessman.
Uribe also pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice after he falsely told prosecutors that the payments he made towards the car were a loan.
According to his plea agreement, Uribe will cooperate with federal prosecutors in their case against the senator, his wife and the three remaining co-defendants, all of whom have pleaded not guilty.
Uribe’s sentencing is set for June 14.
The trial against Senator Menendez and the remaining co-defendants is slated to start May 6.
The bribery scandal is Menendez’s second set of corruption charges in a decade. The lawmaker in 2015 was indicted in a similar scheme involving accusations of peddling political influence to help Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen in exchange for luxury vacations in the Caribbean and Paris, flights on the eye doctor’s private jet and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to organizations that supported the senator. A hung jury ended his trial two years later.
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