MANHATTAN (CN) — New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez summoned the state’s top law enforcement official for a private meeting in 2019 to discuss a pending insurance fraud case, former state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal testified Thursday afternoon in the senator’s public corruption trial.
Grewal said the senator’s request to speak about any pending case with him went against his longstanding personal practice of insulating his staff from outside influence, and had a potentially chilling effect on his office’s investigations.
“It’s my policy,” he testified. “I’m not going to circumvent the normal chain and have a conversation about a criminal case with somebody who wasn’t involved in the case.”
Menendez, 70, is currently standing trial in Manhattan federal court on sixteen counts of federal bribery charges that he conspired with his wife, Nadine, to secretly accept roughly $600,000 in bribes of gold bars, cash and luxury gifts from wealthy businessmen — co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — in exchange for legislative favors to help their allies and interests of the foreign governments of Egypt and Qatar while he was the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Federal prosecutors in New York said one such example of the legislative quid pro quo involved Menendez accepting a new Mercedes-Benz C300 convertible for Nadine in exchange for pressuring the top prosecutor in the state of New Jersey for a favorable outcome in the insurance fraud case of an associate of one of his bribe-payers.
Grewal, currently the director of the Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Enforcement, testified Thursday that Menendez got his personal cell phone number through a relative who was “friendly” with the senator.
In early 2019, Menendez called Grewal on his personal phone to raise concerns over an apparent racial disparity in investigations by the New Jersey Office of the Insurance Fraud Prosecutor concerning “Hispanic defendants vs. non-Hispanic defendants,” Grewal testified.
After confirming that Menendez was talking about a pending criminal matter where the unspecified defendant was represented by Michael Critchley, Grewal advised the senator that Critchley was “one of the finest criminal defense lawyers in the state of New Jersey,” and the lawyer should reach out to the prosecution’s team involved in the case.
Grewal said later that year Menendez invited him for a meeting at his Newark office that he expected would concern the state attorney general's Trump-era policy issues like immigration, the opioid epidemic, and racial disparities in the New Jersey prison system.
The senator again made small talk complimenting the office's work and then quickly brought up the same concerns about investigations by the New Jersey Office of the Insurance Fraud Prosecutor, but did not go into the specifics of the case he was asking about.
"There wasn’t an explicit ask," the former NJ attorney general says about meeting with Menendez. "He didn’t like how the matter was being handled by our office, he wanted it handled differently,” he said.
Grewal said he never learned which specific case Menendez was inquiring about and testified he did not weigh in on any cases arising from the meeting.
Grewal testified that Menendez exhibited “a look of surprise” that the attorney general had brought Executive Assistant Attorney General Andrew Bruck along with him to the meeting, while Menendez conducted their visit to his Newark office without any staffers present in the room.
Shortly after the meeting concluded, Bruck remarked to Grewal: “Whoa, that was gross,” he testified.
On cross-examination questioning by Menendez’s defense attorney Avi Weitzman, Grewal said that the senator did not threaten to retaliate against him either on the phone call or the Newark office meeting.
“I wasn’t afraid of retribution,” he said, but conceded that he feared potentially ending up on “the bad side” of one of the senator’s allies.
Grewal testified that he takes selective prosecution very seriously and said he would recommend the dismissal of charges in cases where "credible allegations" of selective prosecution were brought to his attention.
“It’s not appropriate, it’s not what we do," he testified. "It’s odious.”
New Jersey insurance broker Jose Uribe was initially indicted alongside Hana, Daibes, and the Menendezes, but pleaded guilty in March to buying the new car for the senator’s then-girlfriend in exchange for official acts.
Uribe’s associate Elvis Parra — who was indicted by a New Jersey state grand jury in 2016 for insurance fraud related to a trucking company he owned — was set to stand trial in mid-April 2019, but ultimately pleaded out to a single count of third-degree insurance fraud on April 29, 2019.
Three other charges against Parra were dropped, and state prosecutors agreed to recommend noncustodial probation instead of jail time.
On Wednesday, prosecutors introduced to jurors a cache of thousands of pages of text messages, emails, and voicemails laying out the timeline of Uribe and Hana’s efforts to gift Nadine a new Mercedes-Benz during the same time period that Menendez is accused of pressuring Grewal to kill the investigation into one of Uribe’s associates.
Nadine was carless in January 2019 after her previous car was totaled in a December 2018 crash in Bogota, New Jersey that killed a pedestrian.
According to prosecutors, Uribe ultimately provided Nadine with $15,000 cash for the down payment on the C300 convertible in April 2019.
After the purchase from an Edison, New Jersey dealer was complete, Nadine messaged the senator, “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.❤️” and texted him a photograph of the car.
The trial is expected to run up to seven weeks through the end of June.
Nadine Menendez, 58, was severed from her co-defendants’ May trial due to breast cancer requiring mastectomy surgery, and will face a separate trial this summer.
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