Kim has emerged as a formidable political power in the state’s dominant party.

Returning to his home state in 2018 after serving as a national security official in the Obama administration, Kim defeated a Republican incumbent in 2018, then won again in the GOP-leaning district two years later. He was reelected in a newly drawn district in 2022.

His Senate campaign was borne out of the September indictment against Menendez, which alleged that he and his wife took gold bars and cash in exchange for helping businessmen get lucrative deals with foreign countries. The day after the indictment, Kim said he’d challenge Menendez for the Democratic primary and called for his resignation.

Kim’s campaign met resistance when first lady Tammy Murphy entered the race and locked up party establishment support. That sparked a lawsuit from Kim and others aiming to topple the state’s unique primary ballot, which gave preferential positioning to candidates with party boss support.

In an unforeseen turn, a federal judge sided with Kim and put a hold on the so-called county line system. Murphy left the race, saying she didn’t want to engage in a savage primary fight with a fellow Democrat. In the meantime, Kim had endeared himself to progressives who had fought bitterly against the system for years.

In an interview, Kim said his experience would resonate with voters. He referred to Trump not by name, but by bringing up the former president’s criminal conviction in New York and tethering him to both Menendez and Bashaw.

“I don’t think that any other Democrat in New Jersey would be able to be stronger than we are in terms of being able to step up against Republicans,” Kim said. “Our message right now — standing up against corruption, standing up against broken politics — it’s going to work very strong against Senator Menendez as well as a Senate candidate that backs a convicted felon.”

It’s unclear how Menendez’s trial will play out, let alone how his independent bid could affect the race. Trump’s position as the GOP’s standard-bearer, though, could rally loyal Democrats behind Kim. The former president’s time in the White House coincided with a near-total wipe out of Republicans in House seats in the race. The party has bounced back somewhat from an 11-1 Democratic advantage to 9-3, but Trump is widely viewed as holding back Republicans running for statewide office.

“Trump on the ballot is a bigger problem for Republicans than Menendez on the ballot is for Democrats,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “We’ve seen this pattern of voting in federal elections in New Jersey that has been driven by a significant anti-Trump sentiment.”

A cautionary note for Republicans can be found in knowing they have seen this movie before.

In 2018, Republicans nominated Bob Hugin, a wealthy pharmaceutical executive, who spent millions trying to defeat Menendez.

Menendez was coming off his first federal corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury. Hugin attacked him over the scandal, but Menendez won by double digits.

4-minute read

The first sign of trouble blew into New Jersey last year as a benign spectacle.

Smoke from raging wildfires in Canada lingered high in the atmosphere over the Garden State for a few days in late May, allowing for few stunning sunrises and sunsets in a grainy sky. Then, a few weeks later, wildfires erupted closer to the East Coast in Quebec, and a perfect set of weather conditions sent a record amount of smoke billowing into New Jersey for three days, creating a serious public health threat.

A year after the skies turned dark orange on June 6 and the noxious odor of burning wood wafted across the region for days, the threat of wildfire smoke remains due to the gradual warming of the planet, experts say.

Story continues after photo gallery

It threatens to turn back a lot of the progress made to clean the region’s air. It has emerged at a time when asthma rates are already on the rise and the number of senior citizens, who are more susceptible to developing chronic lung disease, is expected to explode in New Jersey over the next few years.

Despite the existential threat, there’s some good news — New Jersey will not likely see a smoky rerun of last summer, experts say.

How much of a danger it presents year to year is unknown since conditions have to be just right — not only for wildfires to ignite and linger as long as they did in Canada last year — but for the particular wind alignment to carry all that smoke into the region.

“The threat is going to be different every year because of changes in weather patterns,” said Greg Pope, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Montclair State University.

“There was a perfect circulation system that allowed all that smoke to come down here and that’s not going to happen all the time,” Pope said. “The issue is that the risk is increasing due to climate change and there’s no reason to believe there won’t be a continued threat.”

El Nino transitioning to La Nina

Wildfire season has not been as bad as last year — the worst in Canada’s history, with a record amount of acreage burned. But pockets of wildfires are still still erupting up north, prompting air quality alerts in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota last month. Several fires have ignited in Quebec and southern Ontario in recent weeks.

Helping matters is that the weather phenomenon El Nino is transitioning to La Nina — a cooling of the Pacific Ocean surface that generally brings more rain to North America in the summer.

Despite the forecasts, New York City health officials have already sent out a health advisory to hospitals and other medical providers with a quick overview of the threat wildfire smoke poses along with safety measures that should be taken by those with underlying lung diseases.

Have smoke will travel

Wildfire smoke is not new to New Jersey. The state has hundreds of wildfires each year, from the Highlands to the Pinelands. But unlike Canada or northern California, the amount of fuel that New Jersey forests provide is limited in the nation’s most densely-populated state. Combine that with robust local fire departments and the state forest fire service, and most wildfires are often brought under control quickly in New Jersey.

Still, the region has seen its sky grow hazy in recent summers, including 2020, due to smoke that traveled across the continent from large fires mostly in California. But the smoke from those fires was high in the atmosphere and did not pose a health risk — unlike the Canadian fires last year.

Although June 6 to 8, 2023 saw historically bad air quality in New Jersey with a never-before-seen concentration of small particles of burning wood, wildfire smoke continued to sweep into the region well into July. It was at lower levels, but still concentrated enough to cause health alerts for young children and the elderly.

Asthma-associated emergency department visits were 17% higher than normal among all age groups in the U.S. from April 30 to Aug. 4 last year at the height of the wildfire season, according to a study. Although data is limited for New Jersey, another study in New York showed emergency department visits for asthma doubled for all ages in some of the hardest-hit regions near Lake Ontario, and tripled among older children and young adults.

Cleaner fuels have improved air quality, reduced NJ deaths

The threat of wildfire smoke disrupts the steady progress that has been made cleaning up the region’s air.

Although smog remains a constant problem, especially in summer, microscopic particles that once inundated the air due to burning materials such as coal, diesel fuel and wood have dropped considerably. Cleaner energy generation and more efficient emission controls mandated by environmental laws have been credited along with such market forces as a glut of cheaper energy alternatives, including natural gas.

That, in turn, has caused deaths related to air pollution exposure to drop from 135,000 in 1990 to 71,000 in 2010, according to a 2018 study by the University of North Carolina.

“Our air is much better than it was, say, in the 90s,” said Kevin Stewart, director of Environmental Health for the American Lung Association. “The problem is you can see that being turned back by climate change. It’s undoing a lot of progress that’s been made.”

Meanwhile, Rutgers scientists have been studying the toxicity of the smoke from last year’s Canada wildfires and its long-term health implications.

Air monitors near the New Brunswick campus registered a high of 330 micrograms per cubic meter of particles — about 10 times above New Jersey’s air quality standard — over four hours on June 7 last year. It was the equivalent of breathing in secondhand cigarette smoke in a confined room.

Papers are scheduled to be published in journals over the next few months, and Rutgers will host a conference on the findings in the fall, said Philip Demokritou, director of the school’s Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Center.

“We wanted to find out the chemistry of the particles from those wildfires,” Demokritou said. “We also wanted to see what happens to those particles when they come into contact with pollution that’s already in the air.”

Four weeks into Sen. Bob Menendez’s federal corruption trial in Manhattan, jurors have heard barely a peep about the co-defendant who pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against him.

That changed Wednesday, when prosecutors spent the day explaining failed insurance broker Jose Uribe’s role in what they call a many-tentacled bribery scheme, laying the foundation for former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to testify Thursday.

Prosecutors say Menendez, New Jersey’s senior senator, called and met with Grewal several times in 2019 in a bid to stop a state insurance fraud investigation and prosecution into Uribe’s friends.

In exchange, Uribe hosted a July 2018 fundraiser for the senator in Cliffside Park and spent tens of thousands of dollars on a new Mercedes-Benz convertible for the senator’s wife, Nadine, who needed a car to replace one she totaled in December 2018, according to testimony Wednesday.

“The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Uribe texted his friend Wael Hana, who prosecutors said connected him with the couple.

The senator’s alleged attempt to strong-arm Grewal didn’t work — trucking company owner Elvis Parra, who was scheduled to stand trial in April 2019 for bilking nearly $389,000 from an insurance carrier, pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and got sentenced to probation.

Yet Uribe, who covered the $15,000 down payment on the $67,000-plus Mercedes, continued paying monthly bills on the car — to the tune of about $30,000 — until FBI agents searched the Menendezes’ home in June 2022 as part of their corruption probe.

“The car is home,” Nadine texted the senator after signing paperwork for it at the dealership on April 5, 2019.

“Woopy!!!” the senator texted back.

To Uribe, she texted: “You are a miracle worker who makes dreams come true. I will always remember that.”

Prosecutor Paul Monteleoni methodically presented hundreds of texts, emails, calls, and other documents Wednesday, through questioning FBI Special Agent Rachel Graves, that showed Uribe began texting Nadine Menendez so frequently for access to the senator that within months, she called him “family.”

“I will not let you down. You are family,” Nadine Menendez assured Uribe by text when it appeared the state investigation was proceeding.

The senator called Grewal in early September 2019 and two days later met him and Andrew Bruck in a meeting that was conspicuously missing from his official Senate calendar, testimony showed. Bruck was Grewal’s executive assistant attorney general and briefly succeeded him when Grewal left in July 2021 to become director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of enforcement.

After that meeting, the senator texted his wife: “Done.” Uribe later texted a friend and told him that he met with Menendez — whom he called “the Amigo” — at his apartment after the Grewal meeting, and the senator reported feeling “very positive” about it, testimony showed.

In a day of a dizzying amount of exhibits, prosecutors continued trying to dismantle defense attorneys’ claim that Menendez didn’t know much of what his wife did, showing text exchanges both banal and suggestive that he was well-aware of her doings. They also have repeatedly referred to his frequent use of a Find My Friends tracking app to check on Nadine’s whereabouts.

Wednesday’s testimony revealed other tantalizing tidbits that promise to make Nadine Menendez’s trial interesting. She’s not set to be tried until at least July, after Judge Sidney H. Stein granted her request for a delay so she could get needed medical treatment.

Texts showed that Nadine had a flip phone she used for sensitive communications that she called her “007 cell number.” On her loan application for the Mercedes, she said she was “self-employed,” listed her occupation as “vice president,” and reported an income of $197,000.

The December 12, 2018, night she totaled her Mercedes, she was on her way to see Rosemarie Sorce, the wife of a real estate developer and a Menendez donor, according to testimony.

She texted Sorce at 7:28 p.m. that she had hit detours and was just a few miles away — and six minutes later, texted again: “911 call me.”

“I’m sitting in an ambulance,” she texted Sorce 20 minutes later.

Police have said the collision happened at 7:35 p.m.

Nadine had hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian in Bogota. Police did not ticket her or test her for intoxication, and she was not charged. Jurors will not hear those details, which Stein deemed prejudicial.

The trial is scheduled to resume at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. Besides Grewal, prosecutors told Stein they also expect to call an FBI agent who’s a fingerprint analyst.