Jury selection begins in Sen. Bob Menendez’s bribery and corruption trial

MANHATTAN (CN) — The criminal bribery trial of Senator Bob Menendez — the New Jersey Democrat’s second corruption trial in the last decade — began Monday morning with jury selection in the Manhattan federal courthouse.

Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were indicted last September on charges including bribery, fraud, extortion and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt.

The 70-year-old politician was initially charged in a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York that accused him and his wife of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes — including “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value” —  in a yearslong exchange for his political influence, starting in 2018.

On Monday morning, Menendez stood in court and faced the pool of prospective jurors in the trial, which is expected to run for up to seven weeks, through the end of June.

Federal prosecutors have accused the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of covertly aiding Egypt’s authoritarian government and attempting to thwart a friend’s criminal investigation by New Jersey federal prosecutors in exchange for gold bars and envelopes stuffed with cash.

Prosecutors filed additional counts a month later that charged Menendez with illegally acting as a foreign agent by secretly feeding sensitive U.S. government information to officials in Egypt.

The criminal charges forced him to step down from his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but Menendez has steadfastly refused to leave his seat in Congress.

Menendez has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have denied any wrongdoing by the senator.

He was subsequently charged in a superseding indictment in January with receiving gifts from Qatar through one of his co-conspirators, New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes, in exchange for using his influence to help Daibes obtain millions of dollars from an investment fund tied to Qatar. The additional charges extended the timeline of the scheme by another year, into 2023.

An FBI search of the Menendez home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in 2022 uncovered and led to the seizure of over $100,000 of solid gold bars and about $480,000 in cash.

According to prosecutors, Daibes’ fingerprints were found on the cash-stuffed envelopes found at the house, along with nine bars of gold bullion that have serial numbers tracked to Daibes.

Menendez and Daibes are standing trial alongside co-defendant Wael Hana, an Egyptian businessman who is accused of paying bribes to the Menendezes in exchange for helping him lock down a monopoly on halal meat certification and imports. Nadine Menendez was severed from the May trial due to health issues and will face a separate trial this summer.

According to the indictment, Menendez took bribes from Hana, an Egyptian American who ran IS EG Halal Certified, a New Jersey company that was granted an exclusive monopoly in 2019 certifying meat exports to Egypt as compliant with halal meat standards, despite the fact that neither Hana nor his company had experience with halal certification.

Prosecutors say once the company was granted the lucrative monopoly, Hana gave Nadine Menendez a “no show job” that paid out tens of thousands dollars to a shell company, Strategic International Business Consultants LLC, which prosecutors say was used to receive bribe payments.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein, a Clinton appointee from Passaic, New Jersey, is presiding over the trials.

A fifth co-defendant, businessman Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty to bribing Menendez with a Mercedes-Benz convertible. Uribe admitted in the March 1 plea that he lied to federal prosecutors when he told them that the payments he made toward that car were actually for loans.

Those car payments appeared to be referenced in the new set of charges unsealed last week.

According to the indictment, the senator wrote his wife a check in 2022 for $23,000 with the memo line “for car payment.”

But when Nadine Menendez exchanged that same money with Uribe and another defendant, those checks were labeled as loan repayments.

Uribe agreed to cooperate with federal authorities when he pleaded guilty.

The gold bar bribery scandal is Menendez’s second set of corruption charges in a decade. The lawmaker was indicted in 2015 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 deadlocked hung jury ended that trial two years later.

Menendez announcedin March he would not run for reelection as a Democrat but has left the possibility open to run in November as an independent, if he is acquitted on the corruption charges.

“I am hopeful that my exoneration will take place this summer and allow me to pursue my candidacy as an independent Democrat in the general election,” he said.

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