New Jersey
Did he take bribes, or was he duped by his wife? Arguments under way in Menendez trial • New Jersey Monitor
After a slow start, Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial hit warp speed Wednesday, with the defense team using opening arguments to blame everything on his wife and ending the day by demanding a mistrial.
With 12 jurors and six alternates seated after two and a half days of questioning, the case kicked off after lunchtime with prosecutor Lara Pomerantz methodically outlining the 18-count indictment against Menendez — a Democrat and New Jersey’s senior senator — and two of his co-defendants, businessman Wael Hana and Edgewater real estate developer Fred Daibes.
“For years, Robert Menendez abused his position to feed his own greed and to keep his wife happy,” Pomerantz said. “Menendez put his power up for sale, and Hana and Daibes were more than happy to buy it.”
But defense attorney Avi Weitzman told the jury that there were “innocent explanations” for all of prosecutors’ accusations, and he quickly cut to what might be the heart of his defense — Menendez’s claim that his wife, Nadine, kept him in the dark about the gold bars, cash, luxury car, and other bribes she allegedly took from Hana, Daibes, and a third co-defendant Jose Uribe, who pleaded guilty in March.
“The real question for you is: What did Bob know?” Weitzman told the jury.
Daibes and Hana are standing trial alongside Menendez, and their attorneys are expected to deliver their opening statements Thursday morning. Nadine Menendez was charged too, but U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein previously postponed her trial to July because she has a medical issue.
The senator’s wife
Despite her absence in the courtroom in Manhattan, Nadine Menendez loomed large over the trial Wednesday, with both prosecutors and the senator’s defense team repeatedly referring to her and her role in a bribery scheme that prosecutors say stretched back to 2018, when the couple began dating and a year after Sen. Menendez’s last corruption trial ended with a hung jury.
Pomerantz painted her as the insulation Menendez put between himself and his alleged benefactors, saying Nadine’s role as go-between gave the senator plausible deniability.
“Menendez was careful when he was committing crimes,” she said. “He was smart enough not to send too many texts. Instead, he had Nadine do that for him.”
Weitzman, though, portrayed her as a greedy manipulator who took gold, cash, and other bribes without her husband’s knowledge. The couple had separate finances, lived separately until April 2020, and have largely led separate lives since then, and FBI agents found all the gold bars in her locked closet, Weitzman said.
While the 70-year-old senator knew his wife had gold bars, he thought they were an inheritance from her family, who had built a fortune in the Persian rug business, he added. Instead, he said, Nadine had always been financially supported by other people, including a previous husband and by her wealthy family, and consequently “tried to get cash and assets any which way she could,” Weitzman said.
“I’ll acknowledge it smells a bit weird,” he said of what he called “the green and gold elephant in the room.”
Besides gold, investigators also found more than $400,000 stuffed in envelopes, jacket pockets, and shoes all over the couple’s home. Weitzman attributed that hoarded cash to the senator’s habit — forged after his family fled with nothing from Cuba in the 1950s — of making monthly withdrawals of $400 to $500 for decades and keeping the cash at home.
Prosecutors say the riches were corrupt payments for official actions that only a senator could deliver.
“Quid pro quo — this for that,” Pomerantz repeated throughout her opening statements.
Specifically, prosecutors have accused Menendez of taking gold, cash, and a no-show, “sham job” for Nadine Menendez from her longtime friend Hana to help Hana secure a monopoly on importing halal meat to Egypt.
“Hana didn’t actually have any experience in this business, but what he did have was a U.S. senator in his pocket,” Pomerantz said.
In exchange, Menendez also provided sensitive information about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and even ghost-wrote a letter from an Egyptian official to U.S. lawmakers who had held up millions in military arms and aid to Egypt over concerns about human rights abuses there, prosecutors allege.
Menendez also tried to disrupt the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey’s prosecution of Daibes and a fraud investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office involving Uribe, an insurance broker who was friends with Hana, prosecutors said.
In exchange, Uribe gave Nadine $15,000 in cash in a parking lot as a down payment on a $60,000 Mercedes Benz convertible and continued to make monthly payments afterward for years, Pomerantz said.
“This was not politics as usual. It was politics for profit,” she said. “Robert Menendez was a United States senator on the take, motivated by greed and focused on how much he could put in his own pocket, and in his wife’s pocket.”
Weitzman insisted prosecutors were “wrong, dead wrong.”
Menendez took no bribes and never acted as a foreign agent for any government, he said.
“The actions Senator Menendez took were actions on behalf of constituents,” he said.
His interactions with Egyptian and Qatari officials were merely him “engaging in diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. government,” he added.
Weitzman urged jurors to remember Menendez’s long history of public service. Menendez has served in the Senate since 2006, in the House from 1993 to 2006, and in the New Jersey Legislature and Union City politics before that.
“He’s an American patriot,” Weitzman said.
About that mistrial motion
Stein rejected defense attorney Adam Fee’s argument that Pomerantz tainted jurors during her opening statements by implying that Menendez agreed to publicly support Qatar to help Daibes land an investment from a member of Qatar’s royal family in exchange for gold bars and cash.
Fee accused Pomerantz of violating Stein’s order that prosecutors couldn’t discuss the substance of a resolution supporting Qatar that Daibes allegedly urged Menendez to introduce to help him secure the investment.
“This is angels dancing on the head of a pin, your honor. They are injecting this case with that inference,” Fee said.
But after a heated back-and-forth between Fee and prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Stein denied the mistrial motion.
“There’s no basis for it,” he said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
New Jersey
Judge to decide Monday whether RFK Jr. can be on New Jersey’s ballot
Attorney Scott Salmon argues New Jersey’s Sore Loser Law bars presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on the ballot as a third-party candidate. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
A judge is expected to decide Monday whether independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can be on the November ballot in New Jersey.
Kennedy’s push to get on the ballot has been challenged by attorney Scott Salmon, who said New Jersey’s Sore Loser Law bars candidates like Kennedy from running as an independent in November after trying and failing to secure a major party’s nomination. Kennedy had initially said he would challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president before launching his indepedent bid.
Under questioning by Mercer County Judge Robert Lougy, Salmon conceded that Kennedy didn’t submit paperwork to seek the Democratic Party nomination in New Jersey, but he still took “concrete steps” to win the party’s nod, raising money and holding events to get support from Democrats before launching his third-party bid for the White House.
“There’s a difference between words and deeds,” Salmon told the judge. “And if someone is just saying, ‘I’m going to run for president,’ and then they don’t do anything about it, that there’s a distinct difference between that and someone who is actively raising money and spending money.”
Donald F. Burke, attorney for Kennedy, argued that Salmon’s case should not have been filed in state Superior Court, saying that venue is reserved for Kennedy’s presidential rivals. Voters like Salmon are supposed to take their complaints to the New Jersey secretary of state, he said.
Burke has argued that if Kennedy is dropped from the ballot, the winners would be the Democratic and Republican parties, not voters.
“Major political parties would love Salmon to win because what that would do is make a choice of their candidates and no one else,” he said.
New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way is a defendant in the case. Adam Marshall, attorney for the state, said Friday that if Salmon had filed an objection to Kennedy’s candidacy with the secretary of state instead of with the courts, there likely would already have been a hearing at the Office of Administrative Law and a decision by a judge, and the secretary of state could have responded to those findings, Marshall said.
Salmon maintained he filed in the correct venue because he isn’t challenging Kennedy’s petitions to get on the ballot. He added that taking this matter to the Office of Administrative Law now could delay it further and “limit the rights of myself as well as Mr. Kennedy.”
Way, who is also lieutenant governor, has until Aug. 9 to formally certify which presidential candidates will be on New Jersey’s ballot. Lougy said he understands the urgency of ruling on election matters quickly.
Petitions of electors for president and vice president are due to Way’s office on the 99th day before the general election — that would be Monday, July 29 — and filing objections are due four days after that, on August 2, Marshall noted.
Salmon filed his lawsuit in June. He helped get rapper Ye booted from New Jersey’s ballot in 2020.
While Kennedy’s attorneys fight this case in New Jersey and other states, they scored a win in Nebraska. Kennedy secured enough signatures to appear as a nonpartisan candidate on the ballot in that state despite an objection from its Democratic Party, the state’s secretary of state announced Friday.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
New Jersey
Train disruptions for NJ Transit, Amtrak prompt another angry NJ delegation letter
3-minute read
Gateway Project includes new rail tunnel under Hudson River
The Gateway Project’s $18.4 billion first phase will make rail service more reliable NJ Transit and Amtrak riders between New Jersey and Manhattan.
Several members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation have again sent a letter calling on the U.S. Department of Transportation to get involved in the issues plaguing train travel for NJ Transit and Amtrak riders on the Northeast Corridor this summer.
The letter, sent to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Friday, is at least the third he has received from officials in New Jersey seeking accountability over the repeated delays Amtrak and NJ Transit customers have experienced due to failing infrastructure.
“I’m sick and tired of a ‘Summer of Hell’ — year after year,” wrote U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who led the letter, co-signed with U.S. Reps. Frank Pallone, Robert Menendez, Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Bill Pascrell and Donald Norcross.
Story continues below photo gallery
“We need Amtrak to use the $6 billion we passed in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to repair these lines so NJ Transit commuters see fewer delays,” Sherrill wrote. “It’s time to get this fixed.”
Among the requests of U.S. DOT that were outlined in the letter:
- “Have Amtrak provide a schedule regarding how it intends to spend the funds appropriated for state-of-good-repair on New Jersey’s portion of the Northeast corridor”
- “More must be done in the interim to inform riders about outage plans, repairs, and other improvements affecting their daily commute. We ask that you urgently outline a plan to keep commuters fully informed of planned and unplanned disruptions.”
Despite the letters, there has been little direct communication with Buttigieg since the first congressional letter was sent June 25. The secretary was also copied on a letter New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent to Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner in May.
Rep. Menendez spoke to Buttigieg during a June 27 hearing of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, imploring the secretary to “treat this like the crisis that it is.”
“We’re hearing from our residents every day who don’t want to go to work, who don’t want to travel, who are worried about what child care looks like because there’s no reliability,” Menendez said.
Buttigieg said federal staff helping Amtrak assess causes
Buttigieg said Federal Railroad Administration personnel have been “on the ground” assessing the situation and are assisting Amtrak and NJ Transit in a joint review they are finalizing. The review is assessing why NJ Transit’s overhead train equipment is getting tangled with Amtrak’s power lines — the central cause of significant cancellations, delays and disruptions in April, May and June.
Those issues have not reoccurred in July, as NJ Transit and Amtrak have increased inspections, brought in third party assistance and placed cameras on top of trains.
A July 10 incident that was reported as “downed wires” was actually a rope that fell, and on July 21 wires that fell on the tracks were not Amtrak’s but PSE&G’s and had nothing to do with Amtrak’s infrastructure, the utility company confirmed.
Murphy said he has kept in close contact with Tony Coscia, Amtrak’s board chair, as the two agencies work to prevent further incidents.
Earlier this month, Amtrak applied for four federal grants that would help pay for upgrades to overhead wires, a substation replacement project and signal improvements, as well as replacing the Sawtooth Bridge, but those projects likely wouldn’t be completed for years.
Similarly, completion of the Portal Bridge replacement across the Hackensack River and construction of the Gateway tunnels, which would include wire upgrades, won’t be finished until 2026 and 2035, respectively.
Overhead wires, signals and substations throughout New Jersey were first identified for replacement 50 years ago, but $4.6 billion in overdue repairs and upgrades have built up over time.
Amtrak, according to its own documents, has adapted a “run-to-fail approach” instead of a long-term strategy that would have required consistent funding it doesn’t normally have. This has allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate. As a result, decades-old wires droop, causing them to fall or get tangled during extreme changes in weather.
Friday’s letter adds pressure to U.S. DOT and Amtrak to use the $6 billion in federal funding allocated specifically for the Northeast Corridor’s maintenance backlog.
“We were proud to secure this funding for precisely this purpose, and these funds should be used to address the problem right now,” the letter said.
New Jersey
What should be done with accused seagull killer? NJ Top News
Here are the top New Jersey news stories for Friday:
If you are in your yard or basement and pick up a foul stench, it might not be a skunk. It might be a snake.
Some people say it smells like rotten cucumbers, others say it’s just rancid.
New Jersey is home to one of the smelliest snakes. Unfortunately it is also the most common snake you will find in the Garden State.
Once again, Canadian wildfires are in the news. And some of my meteorological colleagues have been quick to ring smoke alarm bells for New Jersey, harkening those frightening images of choking smoke and hazy days from last year’s crisis.
But let’s hold on a second here. The smoke situation is very different this time around. While I can not say there will be “no” impacts to New Jersey’s air and weather, it is very important to keep potential impacts in perspective and in check.
A man from New Jersey and his Florida girlfriend were killed in cold blood by the woman’s teenage child who told police that she disapproved of her mother’s dating age gap and reluctance to accept her transition.
Matthew Szejnrok, 22, and girlfriend Kelly McCollom, 41, were shot and stabbed by the 16-year-old girl on July 7 in the Palm Bay home they all shared, investigators said.
The bloodbath began shortly after the 16-year-old told the couple “welcome home” as they walked through the door, police said, citing the teen’s confession.
TRENTON — A city police officer responding to a call about a possible gunman on Thursday morning ended up in the hospital after crashing into a building.
City officials said the crash was caused by an unlicensed driver speeding through a stop sign on the corner of Second and Bridge streets.
The collision sent the officer’s and driver’s vehicle hurling into a residential building. The crash caused considerable property damage and injured the officer, his police dog, and the driver, Mayor Reed Gusciora said
Lots of disgust from the public after a Cape May man was charged with animal cruelty for a deadly attack on a seagull at the Jersey Shore.
The 29-year-old has been accused of beheading a seagull at a popular Wildwood location.
On July 6, North Wildwood police were called to Morey’s Pier at 2501 Boardwalk Avenue, where witnesses said that a man later identified as Franklin Zeigler had decapitated one of the birds.
Animals gone wild in NJ: Turkeys, tigers, snakes, bears and more
The best of animal encounters — real and a few rumored — from around New Jersey.
Gallery Credit: Erin Vogt
Why Jersey Shore locals must embrace the Benny’s and Shoobie’s of New Jersey
Five reasons why the Jersey Shore wouldn’t be the same without them.
Gallery Credit: Mike Brant
Dennis and Judi brunch cruise: PHOTO TOUR
Gallery Credit: Dennis Malloy
Start your day with up-to-the-minute news, traffic and weather for the Garden State.
New Jersey’s First News with Eric Scott is the longest running news program in New Jersey. Eric Scott began hosting the program in 1991.
It airs live on New Jersey 101.5 each weekday morning from 5:30 – 6 a.m.
New Jersey’s First News with Eric Scott is the winner of the prestigious National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast.
Eric Scott is the senior political director and anchor for New Jersey 101.5. You can reach him at eric.scott@townsquaremedia.com
Click here to contact an editor about feedback or a correction for this story.
-
World1 week ago
One dead after car crashes into restaurant in Paris
-
Midwest1 week ago
Michigan rep posts video response to Stephen Colbert's joke about his RNC speech: 'Touché'
-
News1 week ago
Video: Young Republicans on Why Their Party Isn’t Reaching Gen Z (And What They Can Do About It)
-
Movie Reviews1 week ago
Movie Review: A new generation drives into the storm in rousing ‘Twisters’
-
News1 week ago
In Milwaukee, Black Voters Struggle to Find a Home With Either Party
-
Politics1 week ago
Fox News Politics: The Call is Coming from Inside the House
-
News1 week ago
Video: J.D. Vance Accepts Vice-Presidential Nomination
-
World1 week ago
Trump to take RNC stage for first speech since assassination attempt