Top moments from Bob Menendez’s bribery and corruption trial

The bribery and corruption case against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has featured everything from gold bars to meat monopolies, silver bells to Cuban quirks, Mercedes convertibles to Egyptian camels.

The trial took nine weeks. It was complex and delved into serious charges against the longtime lawmaker, his wife, two New Jersey businessmen on trial with him, Wael Hana and real estate developer Fred Daibes.

Menendez, once the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on 16 counts, including bribery, honest services wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, and conspiracy. If convicted, he could spend up to 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors have shown jurors hundreds of text messages, emails, and photographs of the $480,000 in cash and gold bars that were found in a 2022 raid of the New Jersey home of Menendez and his wife, Nadine.

They have also called dozens of witnesses in an attempt to pin the blame on Menendez, including Jose Uribe, a New Jersey businessman who pleaded guilty to bribing Menendez and his wife with a Mercedes-Benz convertible.

Prosecutors spent five hours on closing arguments, while the senator’s defense lawyers stretched theirs to nearly six.

Deliberations began Friday afternoon. The jurors, six women and six men who are racially diverse and vary in age from 27 to 68 were sent home shortly after 5 p.m. without reaching a verdict. They will resume deliberations on Monday.

Menendez, 70, left the courthouse, telling reporters, “I have faith in God, and in the jury.”

The trial taking place in a Manhattan federal courtroom isn’t Menendez’s first one.

In 2017, he dodged conviction on a laundry list of other corruption charges when the jury could not decide on a verdict.

Here are the top five moments from Menendez’s latest trial.

Ringing the bell

Uribe is a New Jersey businessman who admitted to bribing Menendez by making payments on a Mercedes-Benz convertible for his wife, Nadine Menendez. In exchange, the senator was supposed to kill an insurance fraud investigation looking into his son and a family friend.

Uribe told jurors he directly asked the senator for help on Sept. 5, 2019 and that Menendez said he would “look into it.”

Uribe met Menendez at the home of his then-girlfriend Nadine’s home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Menendez was allegedly holding court at a table in the back patio, puffing on a cigar, sipping a glass of Grand Manier, and summoning his future wife with a tiny silver bell.

“Mon amour, mon amour, please come here,” he said before ringing the bell to call her.

After she rushed in, he asked for paper. Uribe wrote down the names of people being investigated, Menendez took a puff from his cigar, folded the piece of paper with the names, and put it into his pants pocket.

The bell and the “mon amour” underscored the peculiar relationship between the now-married couple.

Menendez’s defense strategy has largely been to blame his wife. His lawyers claim he was lovestruck and didn’t know what she was up to.

Prosecutors pushed back.

“He’s not a puppet having his strings pulled by someone that he summons with a bell,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni said during closing arguments.

Egypt

Menendez has been accused of conspiring to act as an agent of the Egyptian government while he held a powerful role in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

According to the indictment, shortly after Nadine Menendez began dating the senator in 2018, she worked with Hana to introduce Egyptian intelligence and military officials to Menendez.

“Those introductions helped establish a corrupt agreement in which Hana, with assistance from Daibes and Uribe, provided bribes to Menendez and Nadine Menendez in exchange for Menendez’s actions to benefit Egypt and Hana, among others,” according to the indictment.

Menendez allegedly provided Egyptian officials with information regarding the number and nationality of people  serving at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

Without telling his staff or the State Department that he was doing so, Menendez texted the information to Nadine Menendez, who forwarded it to Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian government official. Menendez also ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of Egypt to other senators advocating for them to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt.

“Menendez sent this ghost-written letter to Nadine Menendez, who forwarded it to Hana, who sent it to Egyptian officials,” prosecutors claimed.

Sarah Arkin, a former senior aide who worked for Menendez while he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, testified about the senator’s “unusual” behavior about Egypt and a trip there during a time when prosecutors claim he was taking bribes to help the country obtain more military aid.

Arkin said she was usually involved in meetings Menendez had with foreign officials in North Africa and the Middle East but became worried when she noticed he was having conversations alone with Egyptian officials that weren’t on the books.

In 2019, Arkin testified Menendez told her he wanted to be less publicly critical of the country that has a history of human rights abuses.

Arkin also testified that Menendez in March 2018 handed another staffer a handwritten invitation for two men to visit his office: Egyptian defense attaché in Washington, Maj. Gen. Khaled Shawky, and Hana. When the meeting took place, Menendez’s new girlfriend, Nadine, also attended.

Nadine Menendez

One of the stars of the trial, who never stepped foot in the courtroom, was Nadine Menendez.

The strongest pillar of the senator’s defense strategy has been to blame her.

From the start, his lawyers portrayed her as a woman who lured the senator in like some sort of femme fatale and got him to commit federal crimes to feed her appetite of living the luxe life.

In the government’s rebuttal, prosecutor Daniel Richenthal took aim at the defense’s strategy to shift blame.

“Are you going to accept that there was a secret plan to dupe Sen. Menendez,” Richenthal asked the jury. “That his wife cooked up a scheme to secretly collect money and gold by invoking his name with two men, one of whom was his close friend, and he never learned about it?”

He added, “Let’s be clear about what that means. It means that she duped her husband — her boyfriend and now husband — an experienced public official, one of the most powerful people in the entire U.S. Congress for five years.”

Nadine Menendez was arrested and charged alongside her husband. She was supposed to be one of his co-defendants but had her trial delayed as she recovers from breast cancer. She has pleaded not guilty.

It’s a Cuban thing

Investigators found more than a dozen gold bars during a June 2022 search of Menendez’s home.

Menendez claimed he had them because his Cuban heritage has given him PTSD. Specifically, he suffered from “intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder” because of his parents’ experience in Cuba, with confiscated property, before he was born.

He also said they were tied to his father’s death.

Menendez “experienced trauma when his father, a compulsive gambler, died by suicide after Senator Menendez eventually decided to discontinue paying off his father’s gambling debts,” a court filing reads.

The senator, after charges were filed against him last year, said stashing gold bars and cash was common among immigrant families in case of “emergencies.”

His sister, Caridad Gonzalez, 80, testified to this as well.

She told the jury her family was forced to leave everything behind when they fled Cuba and that the only money they had was what her father hid in the false bottom of a grandfather clock.

She insisted that Cubans often hid cash at home because they were distrustful of the banks and government.

“They were afraid of losing what they worked so hard for,” Gonzales, the first witness to testify for the defense, said.

She added that her aunt had $60,000 in a bag in the basement of her home, which was only discovered after there was a fire.

Meat monopoly

Hana, a failed businessman, is accused of capitalizing on his friendship with the Menendezes and his ties to the Egyptian government to launch himself into a position where he made millions from running a halal meat monopoly.

One of the government’s first witnesses, James Bret Tate, a U.S. diplomat based in Cairo, told jurors how halal meat certification ended up in the hands of a single company run by Hana.

It was peculiar that Hana, a Coptic Christian, was even able to secure a monopoly in the halal meat market, he said. Halal meat adheres to Islamic law as defined in the Koran and involves a specific form of slaughtering animals.

The meat market had been operated by several companies in the past, which kept prices stable, but after Hana took over, prices jumped.

Tate testified the cost of certifying a container the size of an 18-wheel truck carrying 23 tons of meat rose from $200-$400 a container to more than $5,000 for the same service after Hana’s company gained its monopoly.

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“The fee increased drastically,” Tate said.

He added that he had been trying to increase the number of companies that could certify the meat and export to Egypt but was stopped in his tracks and informed it would all be going through one company.