Nadine Menendez put husband’s ‘power up for sale,’ prosecutors say in bribery trial closing

MANHATTAN (CN) — Nadine Menendez wasn’t an innocent bystander in the corrupt bribery scheme that landed her husband, disgraced former U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, an 11-year prison sentence, prosecutors said Thursday.

Rather, she was the integral liaison between the senator and the several willing bidders eager to leverage his power in exchange for cash, cars and gold bars, they said.

“The senator was the one whose power was up for sale,” assistant U.S. attorney Paul Monteleoni told a federal jury on Thursday. “The defendant was his go between, demanding payment … always keeping him informed.”

Nadine Menendez is standing trial for the same bribery scheme for which her husband, a New Jersey Democrat, and their co-conspirators were convicted last year. Her own trial was postponed to 2025 for medical reasons. On Thursday, prosecutors delivered their closing argument in their last attempt to cement Nadine Menendez’s supposed role in the scheme.

That role, according to Monteleoni, was effectively that of a saleswoman, courting requests from New Jersey businessmen and even an Egyptian government official. She then encouraged her husband to take action on those requests, which included protecting the businessmen from state and federal investigations and meddling with the United States’ foreign policy in Egypt, prosecutors say.

In exchange, the Menendez couple received a Mercedes-Benz, $480,000 in cash and several gold bars — which one of the convicted co-defendants delivered to their New Jersey home, along with a box of doughnuts. Robert Menendez, who Monteleoni described as his wife’s “partner in crime,” Googled the price of gold shortly after receiving the bars, according to prosecutors.

“It’s not a coincidence,” Monteleoni said. “It’s a bribe.”

Throughout his four-hour closing statement, Monteleoni continuously repeated the phrase “quid pro quo.” He cited text messages from Nadine that showed she would do “anything to get paid,” including directly instructing her husband to take action on the bribes.

Last week, cooperating witness Jose Uribe told the jury that Nadine Menendez picked out a $60,000 Mercedes C-300 convertible for Uribe to finance in exchange for the senator trying to stop an investigation into Uribe’s trucking business.

“She told me she wanted a Mercedes-Benz,” Uribe testified on April 8, testimony that Monteleoni called “devastating” on Thursday.

After that, Robert Menendez called the top prosecutor in New Jersey to express concerns about anti-Latino discrimination in the state’s probe into Uribe’s company — concerns that Monteleoni said were “completely made up” and designed purely to thwart the investigation.

Robert Menendez was the one to leverage his power, but his wife was the one to orchestrate the bribe, the prosecutor said.

“She did so so she could get a convertible,” Monteleoni said.

Nadine Menendez’s attorney Barry Coburn countered that his client should be found innocent because of the “complete failure of proof” offered by the government for each of the counts.

“A quid pro quo must be explicit,” Coburn said, arguing to the jurors that prosecutors didn’t paint a vivid enough picture of a corrupt scheme to convict Nadine Menendez.

Coburn, in a two-hour closing that appeared largely improvised, instead suggested that Nadine Menendez’s friends and co-defendants like Uribe capitalized on her 2020 marriage to Robert Menendez and determined “that’s something that could be conceivably used to their advantage.”

Uribe’s cooperating testimony was “utterly uncorroborated,” Coburn said.

“There is no corroboration for it other than his word,” the defense attorney said, adding that it would be difficult to conjure a witness with less credibility than Uribe.

As for the senator’s bid to interfere with state probes into New Jersey businessmen, Coburn said there was “no way, no possibility” that those efforts could qualify as official acts to meet the bar for public corruption. The entirety of the government’s case against Nadine Menendez, Coburn told the jurors, lives in “Probable Doubt Land."

Nadine Menendez faces 15 criminal counts in connection to the scheme, including bribery, honest services wire fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion and obstruction of justice. The 58-year-old was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and underwent a double mastectomy while her husband went to trial without her.

Robert Menendez, who is due to report to federal prison on June 6, didn’t attend a day of his wife’s roughly three-week trial. Nadine often sat alone at the defense table during court recesses, and at times ate lunches from her seat in the courtroom.

Throughout the trial, she wore a pink face mask and a breast cancer awareness pin — which prosecutors at one point unsuccessfully tried to get her to remove, claiming it could be “distracting to the jury.”

The jury is expected to start deliberating Friday afternoon.

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