Sen. Menendez convicted of bribery, other charges in corruption trial
Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted Tuesday of taking bribes to do favors for Egypt and Qatar and to meddle in two criminal cases to help three New Jersey businessmen in a case the chief prosecutor said revealed “shocking levels of corruption.”
The jury’s verdict of guilty on all counts came on the third day of deliberations and after a nine-week trial at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. It makes Menendez just the seventh sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of a federal crime.
Menendez, a Democrat and New Jersey’s senior senator, told reporters outside the courthouse that he is “deeply disappointed” in the verdict.
“I have every faith that the law and the facts did not sustain that decision and that we will be successful upon appeal. I have never violated my public oath. I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent,” he said.
Two codefendants who stood trial with the senator — businessmen Fred Daibes and Wael Hana — were also convicted on all counts.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Menendez’s “years of selling his office to the highest bidder have finally come to an end.”
“This case has always been about shocking levels of corruption. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz. This wasn’t politics as usual, this was politics for profit,” Williams told reporters.
Hana’s attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said his client is disappointed.
“He’s surprised, as a person is who is convicted of something that they didn’t do. As an immigrant from Egypt, he’s disappointed that the American system of justice has let him down,” Lustberg said.
Federal prosecutors in New York first indicted Menendez, his wife, Nadine, Hana, Daibes, and Jose Uribe in September.
They charged the senator then and in several subsequent superseding indictments with bribery, extortion, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and acting as a foreign agent for offenses they say occurred between 2018 and last year.
Hana is an Egyptian immigrant who prosecutors say bribed the senator with gold bars and cash, paid his wife’s mortgage, and gave her a no-show job at his halal meat company. In exchange, Menendez steered military aid and arms to Egypt, gave information about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to Egyptian officials, ghost-wrote a letter for Egyptian officials to influence his Senate colleagues, and otherwise helped the Egyptian government, which had given Hana’s company a monopoly on halal meat imports.
Daibes is a real estate developer and bank founder in Edgewater who prosecutors accused of bribing Menendez with gold bars and cash to interfere in a federal bank fraud case he faced and to publicly support the Qatari government so that a company owned by a Qatari royal would invest in one of Daibes’ developments.
Menendez was chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the scheme. He surrendered his leadership role shortly after his indictment, although he remains on the committee.
Scenes from court
The courtroom was packed when jurors sent word about 12:30 p.m. that they had reached a verdict. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and many of his top staff was there, along with the senator’s daughter, MSNBC host Alicia Menendez, and older sister Caridad Gonzalez, who testified in his defense.
Jurors filed in about 12:50 p.m. and handed over their completed, folded verdict sheet. Judge Sidney H. Stein took it, silently reviewed it, and returned it to the court clerk, who handed it to the jury forewoman.
As the clerk asked how the jury decided each of the 18 counts for the three defendants, the forewoman repeated “guilty” 29 times. The court clerk read the verdict into the record and then polled jurors, one by one, to ensure their unanimity. All 12 said “yes,” that the verdict reflected their vote. Altogether, they deliberated about 13 hours over three days.
Menendez watched it all without any noticeable reaction, resting his hands together against his face. Just after 1:05 p.m., Stein excused the jury, 64 days after they first reported for jury duty.
Stein set a deadline of Aug. 19 for post-judgment motions. He set sentencing for all three men for Oct. 29, beginning at 2 p.m.
Hana has been under home detention with GPS monitoring, with a 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew. That allowed him to go to court, meet with his attorneys, go for doctor’s appointments, and other such business, his attorney Lawrence Lustberg said.
Prosecutor Daniel Richenthal asked Stein to heighten his detention to home incarceration, under which he wouldn’t be permitted to leave his home at all. Stein, though, declined the request after Lustberg pointed out that Hana returned to the U.S. from Egypt to face trial, but ordered home incarceration on weekends.
Hana also put up additional security on bond — $237,000 worth of one-kilogram gold bars and his collection of 14 luxury watches.
It was all over by 1:15 p.m.
“It was a well-tried case,” Stein told prosecutors and defense attorneys before leaving court himself.
The other codefendants
Prosecutors say Nadine Menendez acted as an intermediary in many of the schemes and charged her too, but Stein postponed her trial to August after she disclosed last spring she had breast cancer and needed medical treatment.
Uribe pleaded guilty in March in a cooperation deal. He testified during the trial that he paid Nadine Menendez almost $50,000 over three years for a new Mercedes-Benz convertible to replace one she wrecked in December 2018 when she hit and killed a pedestrian. In return, he wanted Menendez to help kill the prosecution of a friend and stop the New Jersey attorney general’s related expanding insurance fraud investigation that threatened to ensnare his own company. He told jurors Menendez told him, “I saved your little [expletive], not once but twice.”
Jurors learned that FBI agents found more than $500,000 in cash, 13 gold bars, and other riches in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home and his wife’s bank safe deposit box during a June 2022 search. Prosecutors brought some of the cash and gold bars to court and passed them around the jury box for inspection.
Prosecutors added the obstruction of justice charges in March, accusing the senator and his wife of trying to conceal the bribery scheme by mischaracterizing the car and mortgage payments as loans, repaying Hana and Uribe $44,000, and causing their attorneys to lie to authorities.
This was Menendez’s second corruption trial in seven years. His first, where he also was accused of trading his influence for gifts, ended in a mistrial in November 2017 after the jury deliberated four days and deadlocked.
Menendez resisted calls to resign after his indictment and last month filed to run for reelection in November as an independent candidate. Rep. Andy Kim (D-03) is seeking to succeed Menendez and will face Republican Curtis Bashaw in the fall.
Federal bribery law requires jurors to find that a public official accepted something of value in exchange for taking or agreeing to take an official action, with a corrupt intent. It doesn’t require the official to have taken the action; a promise to act is enough.
Dana DiFilippo comes to the New Jersey Monitor from WHYY, Philadelphia’s NPR station, and the Philadelphia Daily News, a paper known for exposing corruption and holding public officials accountable. Prior to that, she worked at newspapers in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and suburban Philadelphia and has freelanced for various local and national magazines, newspapers and websites. She lives in Central Jersey with her husband, a photojournalist, and their two children. You can reach her at ddifilippo@newjerseymonitor.com.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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