Jury selection starts Monday in the federal criminal demo of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is billed with accepting “hundreds of hundreds of dollars” in bribes — which include some in gold bars — in return for formal acts.
The when-impressive former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has pleaded not guilty to the expenses in opposition to him, which he’s explained as “salacious.”
The indictment alleges that federal investigators discovered above $480,000 in income nestled absent in the New Jersey residence he shares with his spouse, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and concealed in clothing, closets, and a risk-free.”
It also alleges the couple gained “gold bars, payments towards a household mortgage loan, payment for a very low-or-no-present work, a luxury vehicle and other things of price,” these types of as jewelry and exercise products.
The senator’s spouse, Nadine Menendez, has been charged as properly, but she will stand trial at a afterwards date because of a medical issue.
Prosecutors with the business office of U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York indicted the few and three businessmen who allegedly bribed the pair in September of final yr. A single of those people businessmen, Jose Uribe, pleaded responsible earlier this yr and agreed to cooperate with the probe. The other two, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, have pleaded not responsible and will stand trial along with Menendez.
The indictment alleges Menendez produced beneficial statements about Qatar to support Daibes get a multimillion-greenback investment decision from a business tied to the region. The indictment noted a lookup of Menendez’s residence in 2022 turned up “two just one-kilogram gold bars and 9 one-ounce gold bars that experienced serial numbers indicating they experienced previously been possessed” by Daibes.
Menendez is also alleged to have “provided sensitive U.S. Governing administration information” and taken “other methods that secretly aided the Federal government of Egypt” in return for bribes from Hana.
Prosecutors have furthermore billed the senior senator from New Jersey with allegedly attempting to impede federal investigations into him, his wife and Daibes, and with attempting to intervene in the point out prosecution of an Uribe affiliate and a point out investigation into an worker of the businessman.
Menendez, who has confronted prevalent calls to resign from his Democratic colleagues, mentioned in a speech on the Senate flooring in January that there “will be at demo a entire rationalization of what is the fact about those issues, a reality that proves I am solely harmless of the rates.”
He has also managed the money was all his. “For 30 years, I have withdrawn 1000’s of dollars in income from my personal price savings account, which I have held for emergencies and due to the fact of the background of my family members experiencing confiscation in Cuba,” he claimed in a assertion in September.
Court filings last 7 days clearly show Menendez is looking for to have a forensic psychiatrist testify in his protection. The psychiatrist would say Menendez is afflicted by “intergenerational household trauma, and how this ailment prompted the Senator to create a fear of shortage and a coping system of routinely withdrawing and storing income in his house.”
He’s also seeking to have a forensic accountant testify that irrespective of the prosecution’s assertion that Menendez has been residing past his means, his “spending patterns have been consistent with his lawful payment and money.” Prosecutors are opposing their testimony.
The trial of the sitting down U.S. senator is having spot around two blocks from in which previous President Donald Trump is standing demo in point out court.
The federal felony demo is the next Menendez has confronted given that he was elected to the Senate in 2006. He was billed in 2015 with illegally accepting favors from a Florida eye medical professional, like flights on a personal jet, three nights at a 5-star hotel in Paris and a lot more than $750,000 in political contributions for him and the Democratic Bash. The scenario finished in a mistrial in 2017 following jurors were unable to attain a unanimous verdict and prosecutors made the decision not to retry him.
