Senator Bob Menendez’s corruption trial commences in New York

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) will appear Monday at a Manhattan courthouse for his criminal trial after he was charged by the Department of Justice with accepting bribes and illegally acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Egypt and Qatar.

The trial will begin with jury selection and is expected to overlap with several days that the Senate is in session.

Menendez has not decided whether he will take the witness stand in his trial but plans to be present every day for the proceedings “subject to the schedule,” he recently told a reporter. Criminal defendants are typically required to be present for trials.

Menendez, his wife, and three businessmen were indicted last fall on corruption charges. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleged that Menendez accepted bribes in exchange for using his influence as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit the Egyptian government.

The bribes included hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, mortgage payments, a luxury vehicle, and more.

Menendez allegedly accepted bribes from three businessmen, Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Jose Uribe, and also used his political influence to enrich and protect them.

The indictment was later expanded to include allegations that Menendez also helped the Qatari government and obstructed justice.

Four of the five defendants have pleaded not guilty. The fifth defendant, Uribe, pleaded guilty in May, and part of his plea deal involved cooperating with prosecutors and agreeing to testify against Menendez at trial, according to the agreement.

Menendez is facing 15 charges, including bribery, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice, extortion, and Foreign Agents Registration Act violations.

His wife Nadine, who will be tried separately this summer because of health reasons, is facing 14 charges.

A court filing unsealed last month revealed that Menendez’s defense strategy could involve blaming his wife.

“While these explanations, and the marital communications on which they rely, will tend to exonerate Senator Menendez by demonstrating the absence of any improper intent on Senator Menendez’s part, they may inculpate Nadine by demonstrating the ways in which she withheld information from Senator Menendez or otherwise led him to believe that nothing unlawful was taking place,” the filing stated.

Menendez also urged a judge to allow him to call a forensic psychiatrist to testify as an expert witness about two “significant traumatic events” Menendez experienced that caused him to develop a mental condition, according to court filings. The specific condition was redacted but was related to his parents fleeing Cuba and his father’s suicide, the filings showed.

Menendez’s attorneys argued that the psychiatrist would testify first about how Menendez suffered “intergenerational trauma” because his parents had their money confiscated by the Cuban government. Menendez now has a “fear of scarcity” and a “longstanding coping mechanism of routinely withdrawing and storing cash in his home,” the attorneys wrote.

Secondly, the expert would speak about how Menendez’s father was a compulsive gambler who died by suicide after Menendez stopped paying off his debts, the attorneys wrote.

The witness could provide the jury with a “benign explanation” for Menendez’s cash withdrawal habits, his attorneys said.

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The DOJ has argued against allowing the witness to testify, and the judge has not yet issued a ruling on the matter.

While rare to see a sitting senator on trial, this will not be the first for Menendez. The New Jersey Democrat was tried in 2017 for corruption and bribery charges, and after two and a half months of proceedings, the trial ended with a hung jury.