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Tracey Tully,Benjamin Weiser and Nicholas Fandos
The New Jersey Democrat is accused of taking gold, cash and more. Here’s the latest.
Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat accused of selling out his public office in pursuit of lucrative bribes, “put his power up for sale,” a federal prosecutor said on Monday, the first of at least two days of closing arguments in a historic corruption case against a sitting senator who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
The prosecutor, Paul Monteleoni, described gold bars and “envelope after envelope” of cash seized from the home of Mr. Menendez — once the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee — as evidence of a “clear pattern of corruption” that involved promises of military aid to Egypt and financial gain for two New Jersey businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, who are on trial along with him. Mr. Menendez’s wife, Nadine, is also charged.
Here’s what to know about the trial:
Closings continue Tuesday: Before court adjourned for the day, Mr. Monteleoni told the jury that messages exchanged between Mr. Menendez and his wife — which he said showed her asking for his instructions — were evidence of a conspiracy, even though the senator “wanted his fingerprints off of it.” The prosecution is expected to wrap up its summation on Tuesday, with lawyers for the defendants going next. Prosecutors will also be able to offer a rebuttal before the case goes to the jury.
The allegations: Prosecutors say Mr. Menendez took bribes in return for ghostwriting a letter from Egypt lobbying senators to release military aid; trying to quash criminal cases for Mr. Daibes and another businessman, Jose Uribe; and introducing Mr. Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family who could invest in a real estate development. Prosecutors also allege that Mr. Menendez protected a monopoly Mr. Hana had on halal certifications for food imported to Egypt after his soon-to-be-wife was given a low-show job at Mr. Hana’s company.
Key testimony: Mr. Uribe, who pleaded guilty to bribing the senator and agreed to cooperate with the authorities, was a key government witness. In June, minutes after taking the witness stand in Manhattan federal court, Mr. Uribe testified that he had bribed Mr. Menendez by giving the future Ms. Menendez a Mercedes-Benz.
Menendez’s defense: The senator’s lawyers rested their cast last week without calling Mr. Menendez to testify in his own defense. They have argued that the government has attempted to criminalize routine legislative activity and have sought to shift blame to his wife, saying she kept the senator “in the dark on what she was asking others to give her.” Ms. Menendez is also charged, but her trial was postponed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
A historic prosecution: Mr. Menendez is the first senator ever indicted under the foreign-agent statute, and the first in the Senate’s 235-year history to be indicted twice in separate bribery cases. (His first prosecution ended in a mistrial in 2017.) Prosecutors have circled him for decades.
Political fallout: The case has already dealt a near-lethal blow to Mr. Menendez’s four-decade political career. He did not run in the Democratic primary for his Senate seat last month. And while he has filed paperwork to run as an independent in November, polls show there is little chance he could win.
July 16, 2024, 12:46 p.m. ET
Maia Coleman
Here’s what we know about the jury.
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They heard from top New Jersey government officials. They reviewed scores of personal text messages and emails. They even felt the weight of gold bullion in their hands.
Now, after nearly two months in a chilly federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, 12 New York State residents will soon have to decide whether Senator Robert Menendez is guilty of participating in an international bribery scheme.
The jury of six men and six women, as well as five alternates, has sat through Mr. Menendez’s federal corruption trial, remaining largely expressionless (and mostly attentive) as the government has detailed its sprawling case against Mr. Menendez and two New Jersey businessmen, and their lawyers have sought to counter it.
At the start of the trial in May, the presiding judge, Sidney H. Stein, swore in 12 jurors and six alternates, after two and half days of jury selection. One juror of the total pool of 18, a woman, was dismissed in late June because of a scheduling conflict. The judge said she had a nonrefundable cruise with her family planned for the end of the month.
The jurors who will soon determine Mr. Menendez’s fate live in Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester County, and at least half have advanced degrees. (Mr. Menendez is charged in New York because a number of the acts charged in the indictment occurred there, according to prosecutors.)
They include a retired economist, a former Broadway and television actor now working as an entertainment consultant and an investment banker, as well as four people who work in the health care industry.
Their news media tastes include The New York Times, CNN, NPR, ABC and the New York City-based news channel NY1. Some get their news from social media or blogs. One juror relies on the satirical “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”
Only about a third of the jurors live with spouses, while the others live alone or with immediate family members. The group is also big on exercise; among them are a marathon runner, a skier, a swimmer and a jogger.
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July 16, 2024, 12:41 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
What a verdict will mean for Senator Menendez.
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Robert Menendez’s Senate career is very likely to end this year regardless of the outcome of his corruption trial. But the verdict may determine exactly how.
If Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, is found guilty, he will face intense pressure to resign before his term is up or risk a potential expulsion vote by his Senate colleagues.
If a jury acquits him or cannot reach a verdict, Mr. Menendez has indicated he could run for another term this fall as a political independent. But his chances of success would be slim, especially after his own party already chose a popular congressman as its nominee to succeed him.
Mr. Menendez has been in a similar situation before. His 2017 trial in a separate corruption case ended with a hung jury. After prosecutors decided not to retry him, the senator successfully ran for re-election the next year.
But fellow Democrats say it is hard to know exactly how Mr. Menendez, 70, will respond to a verdict this time around.
He has insisted on his innocence since prosecutors charged him last fall in a vast bribery scheme involving gold bars, aid to Egypt and accusations of meddling in criminal prosecutions. He has rebuffed calls to resign from nearly every major Democrat in New Jersey. And at trial, his lawyers have indicated they are prepared to appeal if necessary.
If the jury returns a guilty verdict, Mr. Menendez could conceivably refuse to step down until his appeal is heard. Doing so would most likely create pressure on his fellow senators — especially Democrats facing difficult elections this fall — to hold an expulsion vote.
The bar for expulsion is high, requiring a two-thirds vote. The chamber has expelled only 15 members in its history, though others have resigned when faced with a possible expulsion vote.
Democrats will face a different bind if Mr. Menendez is not convicted. Some suspect that his vows to run for re-election have been about raising money for his legal defense, rather than an earnest indication of his plans.
But if he did follow through, the result could jeopardize the party’s hold on a crucial New Jersey seat at a time when Republicans already have a good shot at retaking Senate control.
Given his weak standing in polls, there is little chance Mr. Menendez could actually win, but he could siphon away enough support from the Democratic nominee, Representative Andy Kim, to risk tipping the race to Republicans.
July 9, 2024, 12:06 p.m. ET
Christopher Maag
The Menendez indictment set off a political frenzy in New Jersey.
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Facing federal charges that he accepted bribes, including cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, Senator Robert Menendez announced on Sept. 22 that he would not resign.
A day later, Andy Kim, a little-known Democratic congressman from southern New Jersey, gathered his top advisers for a conference call. Everyone present assumed that Mr. Kim would announce his intention to challenge Mr. Menendez for his Senate seat.
The question was when.
Zack Carroll, who was Mr. Kim’s campaign manager during his first race for Congress in 2018, told the group that a typical campaign launch takes six weeks. “You don’t upset a two-term incumbent by flying by the seat of your pants,” Mr. Carroll said.
Mr. Kim listened quietly. Then he read aloud his campaign announcement.
“What if I were to announce in three hours?” Mr. Kim said.
The announcement, which Mr. Kim posted on social media that afternoon, kicked off perhaps the luckiest Senate campaign in modern New Jersey history. Over the next six months, Mr. Kim went from underdog to front-runner, outmaneuvering Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who joined the race in November and quickly won the support of New Jersey’s powerful Democratic Party machine.
In late March, Mr. Menendez said he would not run in the party’s primary. Three days later, Ms. Murphy ended her campaign.
Mr. Kim, who easily won the Democratic primary in June, is not yet a U.S. senator. He faces Republican Curtis Bashaw, a hotelier from Cape May, in November, though no Republican has won a Senate seat in New Jersey since 1972. Mr. Menendez has also left open the possibility of running for re-election as an independent in November. But Mr. Kim has now become the odds-on favorite.
In many ways he has benefited from the frustration of Democratic voters, particularly progressive activists, over the state’s machine politics.
“Tammy Murphy represents the arrogance of the party bosses,” said Valerie Huttle, a former New Jersey state assemblywoman who was ostracized from the party after she challenged a boss-endorsed candidate for State Senate in 2021. “That’s what I think helped Andy.”
Along the way, he also won a stunning ruling in federal court, barring Democratic Party chairs from designing primary ballots that give preferential treatment to their endorsed candidates.
“It is probably the most significant shift in New Jersey politics in decades,” said Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City and a candidate for governor in 2025.
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July 8, 2024, 5:43 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
The prosecutor described what he called a ‘clear pattern of corruption.’
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Prosecutors began closing their case against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey on Monday, retracing the highlights of a tangled bribery scheme they say led the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, to sell out his office for cash, gold bars and even an elliptical trainer machine.
Paul Monteleoni, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, conceded that after weeks of testimony, the government’s case had grown into a tangled web of business deals and foreign intrigue. But he urged the jury to refocus of what he called a “clear pattern of corruption.”
“The timeline tells you what happened,” he said. “When Menendez hears Nadine is going to get paid, he springs into action again and again.”
There was the time Mr. Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, helped ghostwrite a letter for Egyptian officials who were trying to unlock $300 million in aid. Or when he called a top official at the Department of Agriculture to help protect the halal meat monopoly of a New Jersey businessman who promised to put Ms. Menendez on the payroll.
Afterward, Mr. Monteleoni said that the businessman, Wael Hana, and another wealthy associate began paying Ms. Menendez a generous salary.
Gold bars, car payments and other perks soon followed when the senator agreed to help the businessmen quash a pair of criminal prosecutions, he argued.
At several points, prosecutors sought to discredit key arguments by the defense. For example, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have asserted that their client was “in the dark” about the benefits his wife exacted for his actions.
Mr. Monteleoni said that was not believable, and he presented text messages and Google search history that he said showed Mr. Menendez knew exactly what his wife was receiving.
“You don’t get to be the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by being clueless,” he said.
Mr. Monteleoni was expected to complete his closing argument on Tuesday morning.
Mr. Menendez’s lawyers will then have their own final chance to address the jury.
Mr. Menendez fumed as he left the courthouse on Monday.
“The government is intoxicated with their own rhetoric,” he said, adding that prosecutors were trying to tell jurors what “conversations should be that they never heard.”
July 8, 2024, 5:33 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Outside the courthouse, Menendez mocked the prosecution’s closing argument. “The government is intoxicated with their own rhetoric,” he told reporters as he stepped inside a waiting black Lincoln sedan. “They spent two hours on charts.”
July 8, 2024, 5:08 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni ends for the day by fleshing out Count 9, which involves the purchase of a Mercedes Benz for Nadine Martinez. In 2019, Jose Uribe, then an obscure businessman whose business was being investigated by the state attorney general, was asking for help to make the investigation go away, Monteleoni says. In exchange for help from Menendez, Uribe bought Nadine Menendez a car. It would replace the one she damaged in 2018, when she struck and killed a pedestrian.
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July 8, 2024, 5:06 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
The government appears to have gotten through about half of its closing statement today. It focused first on charges that Menendez and his wife aided Egypt in exchange for lucrative bribes. By the end though, Monteleoni was walking the jury through other key charges, including those related to Menendez's alleged attempt to interfere in prosecutions on New Jersey businessmen.
July 8, 2024, 5:03 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
“There’s so much more, that it might make sense to do it tomorrow,” Monteleoni, the government prosecutor, concludes. Judge Stein has ordered the jury to return at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow. The government is expected to conclude its closing arguments then. Senator Menendez’s lawyers will follow.
July 8, 2024, 4:45 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
It’s been nearly two hours of closing arguments, and Menendez continues to appear focused and calm. His left leg is crossed over his right, and he is looking directly at the prosecutor, who is methodically moving through each of the counts in a complex web of charges. Like his daughter, Alicia Menendez, the senator is holding a pen and taking notes in a pad that is resting on his knee.
July 8, 2024, 4:44 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni, the government prosecutor, has now completed his lengthy discussion of two bribery charges against Senator Menendez. He is now discussing additional charges related to the senator’s actions toward Egypt. They include one count of honest services wire fraud and an extortion charge.
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July 8, 2024, 4:43 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
The defense argued in opening statements that Menendez’s behavior was that of an official trying to help his constituents. Monteleoni says the evidence shows otherwise. The text messages, the Google searches for the price of gold, the timeline that shows how actions followed payments to Nadine. “How can it be a coincidence that he’s trying to help someone who is paying him?” Monteleoni asks the jury.
July 8, 2024, 4:29 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni is trying to convince jurors that the absence of a smoking gun showing that Menendez was fully aware of the valuables that were being given to his wife is actually proof of a conspiracy. “Menendez wants his fingerprints off of it” because he didn’t “want to get caught,” the prosecutor says. He is focusing on text messages he says show Nadine Menendez asking for “permission” and “instructions” from her husband.
July 8, 2024, 4:27 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni is back at the lectern, delving into the mortgage payment that Daibes made for Nadine Menendez and the “bribe checks” he wrote to her. When Nadine wanted to get paid, she would ask her husband if it was ok to reach out to Daibes. “Let me know if I should text Fred,” Nadine Menendez texted her husband in September 2019. “No, you should not text or email,” Menendez replied. Again, Monteleoni says, you have evidence of Menendez’s state of mind, his knowledge that he had to cover his tracks.
July 8, 2024, 4:18 p.m. ET
Maia Coleman
Reporting from the courthouse
The energy of the jurors, who appeared alert when Monteleoni began his closing, started to flag as the prosecutor’s summation went on. One hour and a half into the closings, some jurors slumped in their seats. Others closed their eyes for a few seconds. The courtroom gallery, which was packed at the start, began thinning before the break. A few rows are now empty.
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July 8, 2024, 4:16 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully and Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
Nadine Menendez’s trial was delayed so that she could be treated for cancer.
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Nadine Menendez was charged alongside her husband, Senator Robert Menendez, in a complex federal bribery scheme but they’re not standing trial together.
Judge Sidney H. Stein announced in April that Ms. Menendez’s lawyers had told him that she had a “serious medical condition” that would require surgery and a potentially extended period of treatment and recovery. In May, the senator revealed that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment.
Ms. Menendez’s lawyers asked the judge to postpone the trial for her alone because of her health issue. While federal prosecutors said they did not oppose a delay, they asked that the judge not try the Menendezes separately because that would mean holding two lengthy trials.
“The government expects that if this case were tried twice,” the prosecutors wrote to the judge, “it would have to present the same or substantially the same case, in full, a second time. That means picking a jury, a second time, and doing so after the case has already been tried once and a verdict has been returned.”
But Senator Menendez’s lawyers urged the judge not to delay his trial.
“Every day that the specter of the unproven allegations are in the air as to our client is a detriment to him,” Adam Fee, one of Senator Menendez’s lawyers said, arguing that a postponement could effectively hamper his ability to run for re-election in November.
“Every day of delay is prejudicial to him,” Mr. Fee added.
Judge Stein said that given Ms. Menendez’s medical issues, he would sever her trial from her husband’s. “The court will have to try this case twice,” the judge said.
July 8, 2024, 4:12 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
As the trial pauses, it is worth a moment of reflection on what prosecutors are arguing here. Months after the initial indictment, it is still remarkable to hear the bite of their accusations against Menendez. The government is trying to prove that a senior U.S. senator, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was willing to sell out his office to aid a foreign power in order to enrich himself and his wife. Menendez, of course, has pleaded not guilty to all of this.
July 8, 2024, 4:08 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Court is pausing for a 10-minute break.
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July 8, 2024, 4:07 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
For those just tuning in, we are a little more than an hour into the government's closing arguments. Paul Monteleoni, a federal prosecutor, has spent much of that time summarizing unusual actions Menendez took to benefit Egypt, often without the knowledge of his staff. Gold bars, cash payments and a no-show job for his wife, Monteleoni argues, were the payments for all this help.
July 8, 2024, 4:03 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni is showing jurors a letter sent by Egyptian officials who were lobbying the U.S. for a $300 million boost in military aid. Menendez wrote and edited the letter, the prosecutor reminds jurors. He has highlighted the portion of the letter that notes that one of the senator’s own colleagues was objecting to the increased aid because of human rights violations by Egypt.
July 8, 2024, 4:00 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
The case laid out by the prosecution is incredibly complicated, vast and convoluted. The government's estimate that it will take five hours for prosecutors to make their closing arguments seems pretty apt at this point. Monteleoni has been speaking for more than an hour, and we’re still only on counts 5 and 6. Remember that there are 18.
July 8, 2024, 3:58 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
Menendez’s defense team has repeatedly sought to persuade jurors that his actions were standard operating procedure, steps he would frequently take to protect constituents. Monteleoni is trying to blow up that argument. That call from Menendez to the USDA official? “Menendez’s call was the only time -- the only time -- he had ever gotten a call from a member of Congress that was advocating for a constituent at the expense of the United States,” he said.
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July 8, 2024, 3:53 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Menendez taps his hand against his chair, looking without expression at Monteleoni. “Quid pro quo,” Monteleoni says, speaking slowly and deliberately as he urges the jury to look at the timeline of events that he says shows the senator using his office to help his wife and himself. “When Menendez knows that Nadine is going to get paid, he springs into action again and again,” the prosecutor says.
July 8, 2024, 3:52 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Although the senator’s wife, Nadine, isn’t due to go on trial until later, she is a central figure here. Monteleoni just displayed for jurors a text she sent him: “Love of my life, PLEASE, could you fix this letter and send it back to me?” The letter was for an Egyptian official who was asking other U.S. senators to release $300 million in aid that had been held up because of concerns over Egypt’s human rights record. Menendez formulated a ghostwritten response within hours of receiving the text message, the prosecutor said.
July 8, 2024, 3:52 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
She used that phrase another time, the prosecutor says: “What else can the love of my life do for you?” she asked Egyptian officials during a conversation inside a Morton's Steakhouse in Washington that was overheard by an F.B.I. agent. The prosecutor says that Nadine Menendez got an answer the next day: Help one of her husband’s codefendants, Wael Hana, with his halal meat certification monopoly.
July 8, 2024, 3:47 p.m. ET
Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the courthouse
Prosecutors have thrown layers of charges and accusations at Menendez. But they argue that machinations around the halal meat monopoly are enough for jurors to find all the defendants guilty. The senator agreed to call a high level Agriculture Department official to help protect Wael Hana’s monopoly. Hana started to put Nadine Menendez on his payroll days later.
July 8, 2024, 3:37 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
One strange mystery of the government's case in recent weeks: Why was Nadine Menendez talking about glazed doughnuts in her text messages to Daibes, one of the businessmen charged in the alleged conspiracy? Monteleoni tells jurors the government is not suggesting that the repeated mention of doughnuts was code for gold bars. Sometimes a doughnut is just a doughnut.
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July 8, 2024, 3:35 p.m. ET
Maria Cramer
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni, the prosecutor, is focusing on Menendez’s own actions to undermine the defense argument that he was clueless about his wife’s dealings. After a meeting with Daibes, for example, Menendez’s search history showed he looked up the price of gold. The gold bars discovered inside the Menendez home had serial numbers tracked to Daibes, the government has said. “It’s not a coincidence,” Monteleoni says. “It’s a bribe.”
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July 8, 2024, 3:32 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully
Reporting from the courthouse
Monteleoni is now taking aim at what may prove to be a hurdle for jurors in deliberations. At no point in the trial did a witness testify that they had a conversation with Menendez that included discussion of bribes. And much of the proof the government offered will require jurors to make inferences. “Does Menendez know that?” he asks about an item given to Nadine Menendez. “Of course he does.”
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July 8, 2024, 2:50 p.m. ET
Tracey Tully and Benjamin Weiser
A businessman testified about using a luxury car as a bribe.
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After Jose Uribe, a New Jersey businessman, was subpoenaed in connection with a broad bribery investigation involving Senator Robert Menendez, he got a message from the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez.
She wanted to get their stories straight about a Mercedes-Benz convertible he had given her as a bribe, he admitted in federal court. They met a few hours later at a Marriott Hotel.
“She asked what was I going to say if somebody asked me about the car payments,” he said.
He agreed to lie to investigators — and to his own lawyer, he said.
“Nadine says something like, ‘That sounds good,’” he told the judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court, according to a transcript of the proceeding.
Mr. Uribe, 56, then pleaded guilty to seven counts, including conspiracy to commit bribery, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion.
He also agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors in their investigation, according to a formal plea agreement signed by Mr. Uribe, his lawyer and prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.
Mr. Uribe was one of three businessmen charged in what prosecutors say was a vast, yearslong bribery scheme involving Mr. Menendez and his wife. The couple is accused of accepting the car, bars of gold bullion and hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for the senator’s willingness to provide political favors and to help the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Mr. Uribe, a former insurance broker, was charged with providing Ms. Menendez with the Mercedes in exchange for Mr. Menendez’s efforts to intercede in an insurance fraud investigation in New Jersey.
In court, Mr. Uribe admitted that he gave Ms. Menendez the luxury car “in return for Senator Menendez using his power and influence as a United States senator to get a favorable outcome and to stop all investigations related to one of my associates.”
“I knew that giving a car in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation was wrong,” he said, “and I deeply regret my actions.”
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