The jury’s verdict on Tuesday (early Wednesday AEST) followed a nine-week trial in which prosecutors said the Democrat abused the power of his office to protect allies from criminal investigations and enrich associates, including his wife, through acts that included meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials and helping that country access millions of dollars in US military aid.
As the verdict was read in court, the 70-year-old looked toward the jury at times as he appeared to mark a document in front of him. Afterward, he sat resting his chin against his closed hands, elbows on the table.
Menendez did not testify at the trial, but insisted publicly he was only doing his job as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said the gold bars found in his New Jersey home by the FBI belonged to his wife, Nadine Menendez. She too was charged but her trial was postponed so she could recover from breast cancer surgery. She has pleaded not guilty.
The verdict, delivered at a federal courthouse in Manhattan, comes four months before Election Day and potentially dooms Menendez’s chances of campaigning for reelection as an independent candidate.
Immediately after the verdict, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Menendez to resign.
“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said in a statement.
The trial was the second time that the New Jersey Democrat has faced corruption allegations. An earlier prosecution on unrelated charges in 2017 ended with a deadlocked jury.
His co-defendants, two New Jersey businessmen, were convicted of the charges they faced as well. All three had pleaded not guilty. Another businessman pleaded guilty before trial and testified against Menendez and the other defendants.
The jury’s decision is a culmination of a lengthy investigation that included a June 2022 FBI raid on the couple’s home in Englewood Cliffs, a wealthy community just across the Hudson River from New York City. In the home, FBI agents found gold bars worth nearly US$150,000 and cash, mostly in stacks of US$100 ($149) bills, totaling more than US$480,000. In the garage was a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
A supervising agent testified that he ordered the valuables seized because he suspected they might be the proceeds of a crime. Stacks of cash, he said, were found stuffed in boots, shoeboxes and jackets belonging to the senator.
At trial, prosecutors argued that the gold bars, cash and car were bribes. Defence lawyers disputed that, arguing that the gold belonged to his wife and she had kept him in the dark about financial troubles so grim that she nearly lost the home to foreclosure. They said the cash stemmed from the senator’s habitual hoarding of cash at home after hearing how his parents escaped Cuba in 1951 with only the cash they had hidden in a grandfather clock.
More shocking than the cash or gold, though, were allegations that Menendez had earned some of it by using his powerful perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to take actions that benefited Egypt, an important US ally but one that is also often subject to American criticism over alleged human rights abuses.
Prosecutors said Ms Menendez held herself out as a conduit to her powerful husband, exchanging texts with an Egyptian general and helping to arrange a Washington visit by the chief of Egypt’s intelligence service. To one general she texted, “Anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen”.
Menendez, prosecutors said, took actions to ingratiate himself with Egyptian officials, including providing them with information about the staff at the US Embassy in Cairo and ghostwriting a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on US$300 million in military aid to Egypt. The senator also told his wife to let her Egyptian contacts know that he planned to sign off on US$99 million in tank ammunition.
Charges, originally announced last September, were expanded over time, eventually including bribery, extortion, fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and, for Menendez, acting as a foreign agent of Egypt.
Menendez went on trial in mid-May along with two New Jersey businessmen who were accused of paying bribes: Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. A third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty prior to trial and testified against the others. Lawyers for Daibes and Hana said they are innocent.
Prosecutors said serial numbers on the gold bars and fingerprints on tape that bound together the stacks of cash were traced to Hana and Daibes. Some fingerprints on tape, they said, belonged to Menendez.
In return for bribes, prosecutors said, Menendez took numerous actions to benefit the businessmen.
Those included protecting Egypt’s decision to award Hana a lucrative monopoly to certify that meat sent to Egypt met Islamic dietary requirements. Menendez asked a US agriculture official to drop his opposition to the monopoly deal, which he had questioned over fears it would drive up prices.
Uribe testified at the trial that he paid for Ms Menendez to get a Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s help assuring that his insurance business would not be affected by New Jersey criminal probes of a trucking company belonging to his friend.
Prosecutors also said Menendez attempted to interfere in a federal criminal prosecution of Daibes, a politically influential real estate developer accused of bank fraud. The US attorney for New Jersey, Philip Sellinger, testified at the trial that Menendez questioned him about the Daibes prosecution and said he believed he was “being treated unfairly”.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that Menendez took actions favourable to Qatar’s government to help Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund.
Menendez’s political career began in 1974 when, only two years out of high school, he was elected to the education board in Union City, New Jersey. He later served in the state legislature, then was elected to the US House in 1992. He became a US senator in 2006.
Menendez had the dubious distinction of being the only US senator indicted twice.
In 2015, he was charged with letting a wealthy Florida eye doctor buy his influence through luxury vacations and campaign contributions. After a jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict in 2017, New Jersey federal prosecutors dropped the case rather than put him on trial again.
Voters accepted the mistrial as an exoneration and returned Menendez to the Senate.
After his second indictment last summer, Menendez claimed he was being persecuted, saying some people “cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator”.
While the trial was underway, he announced he would run for reelection as an independent.
