Bob Menendez found guilty on all counts in bribery trial

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) on Tuesday was convicted on a raft of federal charges in what prosecutors claimed was a coordinated yearslong bribery and conspiracy scheme. 

Menendez was charged on 16 federal counts including extortion, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, bribery, and conspiracy. He was found guilty on all 16 counts. The jury deliberated for more than 12 hours over the course of three days.

The verdict makes Menendez the seventh sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of a federal crime and puts pressure on the disgraced Democrat to resign before his term expires at the end of the year. He is also the first senator to be charged with acting as a foreign agent and the first to be indicted in separate bribery cases. His first prosecution, in 2017, resulted in a mistrial after jurors could not come to a unanimous verdict.

Menendez sat expressionless in the courtroom as the guilty verdict was read over and over. Sentencing will be Oct. 29, exactly a week before the election.

The third-term Democrat from New Jersey was accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars, a luxury convertible, furniture, and 13 gold bars in exchange for steering aid to Egypt, setting up a lucrative halal meat monopoly, and disrupting criminal investigations on behalf of his friends and family. 

The most serious charges of extortion and wire fraud carry a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Menendez faces a maximum of 222 years in prison for all 16 charges, but it’s likely any sentences would run concurrently. At age 70, he likely faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Immediately after the verdict was read, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate Majority Leader, said that Menendez should 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,” he said.

Rep. Andy Kim, the Democratic nominee to replace Menendez in the Senate, called on Menendez to resign immediately. He called the verdict a “sad and somber day for New Jersey and our country.”

Menendez’s co-defendants, New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, were also found guilty on all counts they were charged with. Hana was charged with six counts and Dabies seven.

Menendez spent five decades in public service and rose to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was there that prosecutors claim he sold out his office and his constituents for personal gain. 

During the nine-week trial, prosecutors showed 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 Menendez. 

They also called dozens of witnesses in an attempt to pin the blame on Menendez. 

The prosecution’s star witness was Jose Uribe, a New Jersey businessman who pleaded guilty to bribing the senator. He testified over three days that his goal was to get Menendez’s help to “stop and kill” an insurance fraud investigation that was being conducted by New Jersey’s attorney general. In return, Uribe testified he agreed to buy Nadine Menendez, then the senator’s girlfriend, a new convertible worth more than $60,000.

Much of Menendez’s defense was to blame his wife, Nadine Menendez. 

His lawyers claim it was she who carried out the nefarious deals and that Menendez was left in the dark. Prosecutors pushed back on those claims.

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. 

During the second day of deliberations, jurors asked the judge whether they needed to be unanimous to reach an acquittal on any count.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein answered that the panel must be unanimous for each of the 18 counts against Menendez, Hana, and Daibes. They would have to either unanimously choose to convict or to acquit on the charges. 

Jurors later asked another question about one bribery count against Menendez and a related charge against Daibes. 

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.