Prosecutors in Sen. Bob MenendezThe New Jersey corruption trial laid the groundwork Wednesday for some of its key witnesses to testify soon, including a former New Jersey attorney general who is expected to testify Thursday.
Prosecutors first needed jurors to understand a timeline that included a fatal crash in December 2018, when Menéndez’s now-wife, Nadine, crashed her car in New Jersey and killed a pedestrian.
Her car was totaled and Nadine was stuck renting, borrowing her then-boyfriend Bob Menendez’s ride and telling people she wanted a new Mercedes – a car that, according to one of her own text messages, she couldn’t afford to buy.
Then, according to prosecutors, a New Jersey insurance broker named José Uribe intervened with bribery. For months, Uribe had been concerned about the New Jersey attorney general’s office investigating insurance fraud in the trucking industry.
The purpose of Uribe’s bribe, prosecutors allege, was to obtain the senator’s help in stopping a criminal case and a state investigation, both related to insurance fraud.
Uribe is cooperating with prosecutors and is expected to testify in the coming weeks.
Uribe already knew Menendez, for whom he hosted a fundraising cocktail party in 2018. According to a timeline from prosecutors, he suddenly came into close contact with Nadine Menendez after her accident, in part through his friend Wael “Will” Hana , an Egyptian-American businessman also accused of paying bribes to the Menendezes.
Prosecutors pointed to a flurry of communications in the months after the crash between Nadine Menendez, known at the time as Nadine Arslanian, and Uribe. Punctuating these exchanges were phone records that showed Nadine calling the senator shortly before or after conversations with Hana and Uribe.
After receiving details of the state criminal case Uribe was interested in, for example, she called the senator from a flip phone she had labeled “cell number 007.” The senator called back and they talked. Later that afternoon, in late January 2019, the senator called then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.
Grewal is expected to testify next, as early as Thursday. Prosecutors said Menendez complained to the attorney general about the criminal case and asked him to get involved. Menendez’s defense team said the senator was concerned about selective prosecutions of Latino truck drivers.
The senator also tried to distance himself from the details of Nadine Menendez’s financial life.
But according to prosecutors, Menendez knew mundane details of her life, like when she sorted emails while waiting at a car dealership in Edison, New Jersey, to buy her new Mercedes in early April 2019.
Just days earlier, the senator, after a half-hour FaceTime call between the couple, texted her an Instagram image of graduation caps being tossed in the air and text that read: “Ask yourself If what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.
In those first days of April, Uribe sent a message to an industry associate and said: “I need 15 thousand in cash this afternoon.” When Nadine Menendez put a down payment on her $67,000 car days later, she paid $15,000 using a combination of cash, card and check payments.
A few weeks later, in early May 2019, just before the first monthly payment on her new car was due, Nadine Menendez invited Uribe to smoke a cigar or drink with the senator.
That night, someone used their phone to take a photo of Uribe, the senator and Nadine Menéndez posing together in a bar, the senator with a cigar in his hand.
Minutes earlier, she had sent Uribe a message with the last four digits of her Social Security number, which Uribe later sent to an associate in the trucking industry.
Together, Uribe or his associate would end up making dozens of monthly payments of $800 for Mercedes.
Only after the FBI searched the Menendez home in 2022 did Nadine Menendez take over the car payments, according to prosecutors.
Although there was talk of a “007” phone, the details were perhaps not Hollywood enough for the jurors. One appeared to doze off completely during part of the testimony and others appeared to have difficulty concentrating.
The process of entering hundreds of text, phone and bank records into evidence required prosecutors to ask question after question of an FBI special agent, Rachel Graves, who had gone through a long spreadsheet summarizing the evidence to ensure it matched the underlying documents that investigators obtained in their documents. multi-year investigation.
After jurors left for a break, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein loudly questioned prosecutors about their presentation of the case.
“I can only quote what you asked her to read,” the judge said, referring to Graves, “which is: Ask yourself if what you are doing today is bringing you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.”
Menendez’s attorney, Adam Fee, began questioning the FBI agent on Wednesday by suggesting that some of the messages were cherry-picked. The interrogation is expected to continue on Thursday.
The timeline also included evidence that Nadine Menendez was texting minutes before the fatal 2018 crash. Ever been charged for using a cell phone while driving – once in 2021 to which she pleaded guilty and once in 2016 which was resolved with a confession that was not detailed in records available online.
Jurors in Bob Menendez’s corruption trial were not told many details of the accident.
But prosecutors’ timeline showed that Nadine Menendez sent a text to a friend at 7:28 p.m. that night that said, “I’m 4 miles away due to two detours.” The accident occurred minutes later.
A lawyer for Nadine Menendez would not comment Wednesday on whether she was texting while driving before the 2018 crash. She is also charged in the corruption case but has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is expected to be tried separately later.
