Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife were indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges in connection to their “corrupt” relationship with three New Jersey businessmen, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
The indictment against the senator and his wife, Nadine, was unsealed Friday following a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York. The Justice Department alleged Menendez and his wife accepted gold bars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a felon in a trade for help.
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Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used his position of influence “to benefit the government of Egypt in various ways,” including by providing nonpublic U.S. government information to Egypt and otherwise taking steps “to secretly aid” the Egyptian government, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said during a press conference Friday.
Williams added, “This investigation is very much ongoing. We are not done.”
Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes, the businessmen with whom Menendez allegedly had a corrupt relationship, were named as co-defendants in the indictment.
The bribes Menendez accepted “included cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value,” according to a copy of the indictment.
Federal agents searched the Menendezes’ home in New Jersey in June 2022 and found “fruits” of the couple’s “corrupt bribery agreement” with the three businessmen, including $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes and hidden in clothing, the indictment said.
It alleged that some of the cash found contained the fingerprints of Daibes, one of the co-defendants.
Officials also found $70,000 in Nadine Menendez’s safe deposit box and $100,000 worth of gold bars “provided by either Hana and Daibes,” according to the indictment.
The indictment detailed a trip Menendez took in October 2021 to Egypt and stated that the day after he returned home, he “performed a web search for ‘how much is one kilo of gold worth.'”
Menendez indicated in a statement Friday that he was innocent, saying, “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists.”
He also accused prosecutors of “misrepresenting the normal work of a Congressional office.”
He and the four co-defendants are set to appear in federal court in Manhattan the morning of Sept. 27, and their case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein.
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This is the second time that the New Jersey senior senator has been charged with corruption. An indictment against him in 2015 ended in a mistrial three years later after a jury failed to reach a verdict and the judge presiding over the case acquitted him on some charges.
“This is an even stronger case. And the evidence is quite overwhelming on first blush,” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said on Fox News, comparing Friday’s indictment to the first one that ended in a mistrial.
