The Swamp in Washington, D.C. is alive and well. But one Democrat couldn’t seem to hide his corruption.
And now this US Senator indicted for committing one despicable crime.
Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife Nadine were charged on Tuesday with lying to federal investigators in a fresh, extended indictment accusing them of collecting gold bars and cash in exchange for favors from local companies and foreign governments.
Both Menendez, 70, and Nadine were accused with new obstruction of justice and bribery offenses in the fourth version of an indictment unveiled by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
The married couple, together with co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, are now accused with 18 counts—16 of which involve the senator—as part of a “corrupt relationship” to benefit New Jersey businesspeople, the Egyptian government, and Qatar, according to the new indictment.
The alleged bribes included more than $566,000 in cash, almost $100,000 in gold bars, home mortgage payments, compensation for a “low-or-no-show job,” a Mercedes-Benz convertible, exercise machines, and an air purifier.
Previous charges charged the senator with wire fraud, extortion, bribery, and operating as a foreign agent for Egypt from 2018 to 2022, while he was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Menendez has now stepped down from that role, but he has refused to retire from office, despite pressure from Republican and Democratic colleagues.
A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which announced the charges, declined to comment.
The indictment comes after Jose Uribe, a fifth co-defendant in the case, pleaded guilty on Friday to obstruction of justice charges and promised to “cooperate fully” with authorities.
Uribe admitted to making three wire transfers to Nadine Menendez through a Bronx bank in order to impede a New Jersey Attorney General’s Office investigation into one of his associates for possible insurance fraud.
Uribe’s cooperation may have resulted in fresh claims in the filing regarding false statements given by the senator and his wife to federal investigators in August and September 2023, shortly before their first indictment.
Menendez, his wife, Hana, and Daibes, who have all plead not guilty, are due to go to trial on May 6.
The most recent accusation alleges that in exchange for bribery, the Garden State Democrat supplied classified US government information to Egypt and lobbied the US Department of Agriculture to safeguard a business monopoly Hana controlled.
It also reiterates the senator’s role in a 2021 arrangement between Daibes, a real estate developer, and a member of Qatar’s royal family to establish a connection with a Doha-linked corporation.
In June 2022, the FBI raided Menendez’s New Jersey house and seized the cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” along with the gold bars.
On Monday, federal judge Sidney Stein denied Menendez’s lawyers’ request to declare the search warrants that uncovered the “fruits” of his corrupt arrangement with Hana, Daibes, and Uribe unlawful.
Menendez has accused the Justice Department of “persecution,” noting at the beginning of this year that prosecutors had filed three indictments against him since September.
“By filing three indictments — one in late September, a second one a few weeks later in mid-October and a third one just last week in early January — it allows the government to keep the sensational story in the press, it poisons the jury pool and it seeks to convict me in the court of public opinion,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor in January.
“There is no evidence of the giving or receiving of cash and gold bars,” he incorrectly stated at another time, saying reporters had not “read the indictment.”
Serial numbers discovered on gold bars taken during the raid matched those reported missing by Daibes following a 2013 armed robbery of his Edgewater home, which were eventually recovered by authorities.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
