A jury began deliberating Friday afternoon in Sen. Bob Menéndezin bribery trial after four days of closing arguments in which prosecutors accused the New Jersey Democrat of “large-scale corruption” by handing out favors to businessmen who showered him and his wife with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold.
Menendez’s lawyer maintained that the evidence only showed that the three-term senator had defended his constituents. “He was doing his job and doing it well,” his lawyer Adam Fee told the jury.
Asked on his way to New York federal court Friday morning how he felt about the jury receiving the case, Menendez said, “I loved it.”
The jury decided the case shortly after 2 p.m. ET on Friday, following lengthy charging instructions from U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein.
The final phase of the criminal trial – Menéndez’s second since 2015 – follows eight weeks of testimony from 34 witnesses, but not the senator himself. He chose not to testify in his own defense, as was his right.
Menendez has declared himself innocent to corruption charges, which include bribery, wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. His wife and two businessmen were also indicted in the case and declared himself innocent.
Prosecutors alleged that bribes in the form of gold bars and about $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes, hidden in clothing, closets and a safe were discovered during a raid on Menendez’s New Jersey home in 2022. Another $70,000 were found in his wife’s security deposit. box, they said.
The alleged bribes were paid by three businessmen from 2018 to 2022 in exchange for Menendez’s official acts as a senator, according to prosecutors.
“Robert Menendez, the senior U.S. senator from the state of New Jersey, ranking member and then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has put his power up for sale,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told jurors in his closing arguments Monday. .
Two of the businessmen – Wael Hana and Fred Daibes – are being tried with Menéndez, after the third, José Uribe, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in a deal with prosecutors. The trial of Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, was postponed after she underwent surgery related to a breast cancer diagnosis.
Menendez’s defense team rested its case on July 3 after calling five witnesses, less than a week after prosecutors rested their case, which included testimony from 29 witnesses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz argued in his opening statement at the start of the trial in May that Menendez had abused his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to “put greed first.”
Menéndez’s attorney, Fee, told jurors in his closings that his client’s actions were “legal” and “normal” and that the evidence against his client was “painfully thin.”
“The prosecutors have not come close to meeting their burden…that the money or gold was given as a bribe,” Fee said.
Menendez is accused of providing favors that included helping Egyptian officials who allegedly granted Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, a monopoly as an individual halal certifier of U.S. foods exported to Egypt in exchange for the senator’s influence.
The monopoly has led to increased costs for some U.S. meat suppliers, prosecutors said, alleging that Menendez was invited during a 2019 meeting with his wife, Hana, and an Egyptian intelligence official, to counter the Department of Defense’s objections. US agriculture to monopoly.
Ted McKinney, former undersecretary of commerce and foreign agricultural affairs, testified in court about a 2019 phone call he had with Menendez, saying the senator urged him to stop “interfering” with his constituents. McKinney recalled that “it was the first time I had received a call that we thought would clearly harm elements of the U.S. food and agriculture industry.”
Menéndez is also accused of doing favorable statements about Qatar to help Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company linked to the country in exchange for gold bars and cash.
Uribe, a key government witness in the case, testified that he sought the senator’s help to keep a criminal investigation under control by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office on his associates and that he had bribed Menéndez providing his wife with a Mercedes-Benz. The senator called then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to discuss the matter, according to prosecutors.
Defense lawyers argued that the gold bars discovered during the 2022 raid belonged to Menendez’s wife and that her family was accustomed to keeping money at home.
Menéndez also argued through his lawyers that his wife kept him unconscious of his financial difficulties and that he did not act illegally. The Menendezes started dating in 2018 and got married in 2020.
The prosecution’s final witness, FBI forensic accountant Megan Rafferty, testified that the gold bars found in the couple’s home were either from Daibes’ inventory or were attached to the same packaging as the bars purchased by Hana.
The senator’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez, and Nadine’s sister, Katia Tabourian, testified as defense witnesses.
Gonzalez, who grew up in Cuba, told the jury that after moving to the United States, their father discouraged them from trusting banks and that she was not surprised when, in the mid-1980s, her brother asked her to take $500 from a shoebox in a bedroom closet.
“It was normal. It’s a Cuban thing,” she said.
Tabourian testified that the money and gold were given to her and Nadine Menendez by their parents and grandmother as gifts. Defense attorneys provided a handwritten “inventory list” drawn up by his father, which listed “3 kilograms of gold bars.” The list dated back to 1976 and did not include serial numbers or bank names for the gold bars.
She also testified that she had seen gold in Nadine’s house dating back “years and years,” but did not know if it was the same gold seized by the FBI.
Prosecutors noted that some of the envelopes of money in the Menendezes’ home had Daibes’ fingerprints on them, while others had Hana’s associates on them. Monteleone told jurors that Menéndez was “desperately trying to pass the buck” for the money found in the house. “The thousands and thousands of dollars stop here,” he said.
Menendez, 70, who has served in the Senate since 2006, resigned as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee shortly after he was indicted in September, but resisted. resigns.
Last month, he ran for re-election as independent. He will face Rep. Andy Kim, the Democratic candidateand Republican Curtis Bashaw.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
