Jury convicts Senator Bob Menendez on all federal bribery counts

MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal jury convicted Senator Bob Menendez on Tuesday on bribery and conspiracy charges that placed the New Jersey Democrat at the center of a scheme to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from Garden State businessmen who sought his political influence.

The 12-person jury deliberated for 12 hours since Friday afternoon before arriving at the guilty verdicts on each of the 16 counts with which he was charged.

The jury forewoman read “guilty” 29 individual times, announcing guilty verdicts on all counts for Menendez and his two trial co-defendants: New Jersey real estate tycoon Fred Daibes and businessman Wael Hana.

All three co-defendants will be sentenced on Oct. 29.

Menendez, the highest-ranking Latino member of Congress, was charged with felony counts accusing him and his wife, Nadine Menendez of bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction of justice, among other counts.

The verdict capped a two-month trial in the high-profile corruption case, which already compelled Menendez to step down temporarily from his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to abandon his Democrat candidacy for 2024 reelection. (He announced plans to instead run in November as an independent.)

In response to the ruling, New York Senator Chuck Schumer immediately called for Menendez to resign, joining the same plea from fellow Democrats including New Jersey Senator Cory Booker when charges were filed last year.

Speaking to reporters outside of the Manhattan federal courthouse after the verdict came down, Menendez ignored inquiries about the calls for his resignation, but did give a brief statement to reporters in which he denied any wrongdoing and pledged to prevail on appeal.

“I have never violated my public oath,” he said. “I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent.”

“The decision rendered by the jury today will put at risk every member of the United States Senate in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be,” he concluded.

Federal prosecutors accused Menendez of, among other things, spearheading efforts to close a major U.S. arms sale to Egypt while feeding information to Egyptian intelligence sources. He was also charged with abusing his political influence to aid a New Jersey real-estate developer at the behest of the Qatari royal family.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams applauded the jury’s verdict on Tuesday afternoon, announcing the convictions as part of his office’s commitment to fighting public corruption, “regardless of political party.”

“This wasn’t politics as usual; this was politics for profit,” he wrote in a statement. “Because Senator Menendez has now been found guilty, his years of selling his office to the highest bidder have finally come to an end. Corruption isn’t costless: it erodes public trust, and it undermines the rule of law.”

Jurors signaled that they may have been unable to reach consensus earlier during deliberations on Monday morning, asking for clarification in a note to the judge: “Does a not guilty verdict on a single require unanimity?”

Later in the day, they inquired about a pair of charges relating to an alleged scheme tying Menendez to bribes from Daibes, who was then under investigation by the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“Does intervening in the federal prosecution of Daibes in New Jersey fall under counts 11 and 12 in the indictment?” the jurors asked.

A grand jury charged the 70-year-old Menendez in the Southern District of New York last September, outlining a scheme starting in 2018 in which he and his wife took hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes in “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value."

Indicted alongside the couple were three New Jersey businessmen — Daibes, Hana and a Dominican-American insurance broker Jose Uribe — who were each accused of paying bribes to Bob Menendez while Nadine Menendez acted as a back-channel liaison.

At trial, prosecutors said Bob Menendez, who joined the Senate in 2006, “put his power up for sale,” naming political favors like interference with multiple state and federal investigations and the unfreezing of $99 million of U.S. military aid to Egypt. They said he acted as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the government of Qatar and pressured the Department of Agriculture to not scrutinize an ally’s lucrative halal meat monopoly.

Menendez’s defense attorneys insisted during trial that Nadine — who began dating the senator in 2018 and married him two years later — kept him in the dark about her financial troubles and the assistance she requested from the businessmen.

Menendez claims the gold bars found by the FBI in Nadine’s home had been inherited from her Lebanese parents who purportedly left her gold bars and jewels as an inheritance, while the bundles of cash stashed around the house was actually from decades of innocuous cash withdrawals by Menendez due to his upbringing by Cuban immigrants in a household where storing large amounts of cash at home was normal.

During defense closing arguments, Daibes’ attorney Cesar De Castro insisted that any cash and gold found at Bob and Nadine’s home were gifts to “cultivate friendship” and “build good will” with the Menendez family.

Uribe reached a cooperation deal with prosecutors ahead of trial and pleaded guilty to seven counts in March.

He testified at trial detailing a conspiracy to buy Nadine Menendez a new Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s efforts to extinguish a string of looming criminal insurance fraud investigations by state prosecutors.

Uribe’s sentencing date has not yet been set.

Nadine Menendez, 58, was severed from her co-defendants’ May 2024 trial due to breast cancer requiring mastectomy surgery. Her separate trial has been postponed indefinitely. “The trial of this matter is adjourned sine die,” U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein wrote in an order Monday.

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

Follow @jruss_jruss