Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York added another dozen charges on Tuesday in a revised criminal indictment of long-time New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez. The previous indictment stated that the senator and his wife conspired with three businessmen to help them obtain lucrative contracts with the Egyptian government and a Qatari investment fund.
This time Menendez isn’t going to be able to finesse his way out. One of the three businessmen agreed to turn state’s evidence against Menendez last week.
The original 39-page indictment, issued last September, charged him with “conspiracy to commit bribery,” “conspiracy to commit fraud,” and “conspiracy to commit extortion.” The new charges include obstruction of justice, acting as an unregistered foreign agent (Egypt), bribery, extortion, and wire fraud.
Since 1993, when he was first elected to the House of Representatives, Menendez has found various ways to enrich himself by using his office to sell favors in exchange for cash, goods, gold, and cars. And since then he has managed to skate each time prosecutors sought to put him away.
He and his wife, Nadine, made headline news last year following the execution of a search warrant of their home, where they stupidly stored a lot of the loot:
Over $480,000 in cash — much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe — was discovered in [Menendez’s] home, as well as over $70,000 in Nadine Menendez’s safe deposit box, which was also searched pursuant to a separate search warrant.
Some of the envelopes contained the fingerprints and/or DNA of [New Jersey developer Fred] Daibes or his driver. Other of the envelopes were found inside jackets bearing Menendez’s name and hanging in his closet.
Perhaps Menendez thought he was above the law, that perhaps his influence as senior senator from New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be sufficient to protect him. After all, George Santos was able to postpone his own day of reckoning for years, and that was after he freely admitted to the press and to the world that he was corrupt to the core.
For 10 years Menendez rented out space in a building that he owned to a nonprofit government agency, collecting modest rents. But the game wasn’t in those relatively paltry rents. It was in his successfully persuading the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to designate the property as a federally qualified “health center” that me made his money. Over the next eight years, he collected nearly $10 million in rents.
In 2006 he was involved in extortion. In 2012 he traveled frequently to the Dominican Republic to participate in sex parties involving underage girls hired as prostitutes. The FBI investigated but never brought charges.
In 2015 he was indicted on multiple counts of corruption. In 2017 his trial ended with a hung jury, and the Department of Justice decided not to press the matter. But note: His “partner” in that crime, a wealthy Miami ophthalmologist, Salomon Melgen, was found guilty of 67 counts of Medicare fraud and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
In 2018 the Senate Ethics Committee publicly admonished Menendez for his corruption.
The present list of charges includes a scheme to release a hold on $300 million in foreign aid to Egypt. It involved illegally giving the names of U.S. embassy employees to the government in Cairo:
Without telling his professional staff or the State Department that he was doing so, on or about May 7, 2018, Menendez texted that sensitive, non-public embassy information to his then-girlfriend Nadine Menendez, who forwarded the message to [Egyptian-American businessman Wael] Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian government official.
Later that same month, Menendez ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of Egypt to other U.S. 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.
Menendez’s trial is due to begin in May. If convicted of all charges he could spend the next 45 years in jail. He is now 70 years old. Readers are invited to do the math.
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