Yesterday, a jury in Manhattan found New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez guilty of 16 counts including bribery, obstruction, honest services fraud, and wire fraud. He has not yet resigned, and shows no sign of intending to.
Menendez was originally indicted in September of 2023, along with his wife Nadine Arslanian Menendez and three New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Jose Uribe. Prosecutors alleged a comical campaign of corruption, with the senator using his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to act as a political concierge for government agents from Egypt and Qatar. The scheme included a no-work consulting gig for Nadine at a halal meat company, hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Menendez’s campaign, an elliptical machine, and a new Mercedes to replace the one that got totaled in 2018 when Nadine hit and killed a pedestrian in Bogota, New Jersey. (The town gets its name from Karma, who has clearly abandoned us to our fate and wandered off to make terrible jokes.)
When they raided the couple’s home in June of 2022, the FBI discovered almost half a million in cash, some of it stuffed in the pockets of a jacket with Menendez’s name and the seal of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Agents also discovered upwards of $100,000 gold bars, conveniently marked with the serial numbers of bars which reported stolen by Daibes in 2013 and later recovered by police. Daibes fingerprints were also on some of the envelopes of cash found in the Menendez’s house.
This was not the first rodeo for the senator, who escaped conviction on a prior corruption indictment in 2017 thanks to a hung jury. And so he gamely challenged the warrant and accused the prosecutors of misconduct born out of a “zeal to ‘get back’” at him. He painted his critics as racist, huffing that “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” and claiming that, as a child of Cuban refugees, keeping large amounts of cash around the house was part of his heritage. He also blamed his wife, from whom he severed his case, alleging that he had no idea how all that cash and gold made its way into the house they shared together.
This position was somewhat undercut at trial by Nadine’s unfortunate habit of documenting every transaction with a detailed text. “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.❤️” she tapped out in April of 2019 after Uribe fronted her with the $15,000 downpayment for the car.
Later companies associated with the co-defendants made payments on the vehicle.
Menendez escaped a reckoning last time in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the bribery case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. But the politician seems to have taken SCOTUS’s ruling, which made it almost impossible to prove political bribery, as a challenge.
“Tell Will I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today,” he wrote to his wife in 2018, referring to a sale of tank munitions which had been on hold because of that country’s human rights record.
“Anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen,” Nadine texted an Egyptian official in 2020.
Whether this will satisfy the Supreme Court’s pro-corruption wing is unclear. After the McDonnell opinion and the Trump immunity decision, it’s not clear whether anything short of a notarized declaration by all parties trading cash for official acts will suffice. But the Senator sure did give it the old college try!
In the meantime, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer are calling for Menendez to resign or be expelled. Probably because they are RACIST!
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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