Attorneys representing New Jersey’s senior Democratic Senator Bob Menendez will definitely earn their hefty fees over the next five to eight weeks trying to keep their high-profile client from serving 45 years for his alleged crimes.
Their strategy is simple enough: declare that Menendez has some mental and psychological problems that led him to behaving in a corrupt manner. As a backup, they plan on blaming Menendez’s second wife, Nadine, for hiding all the corruption from the good and honorable senator. Her trial begins on July 8.
The investigation into Menendez’s activities concerning favors he granted to three businessmen over several years led to an indictment last September for bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice, and failing to register as an agent for a foreign government. When one of the three businessmen who were allegedly involved in the crimes turned state’s evidence, the DOJ expanded the indictment against Menendez in January and then further in March.
The one who agreed to help the DOJ in its prosecution of the case against Menendez, Jose Uribe, struck a plea deal and in exchange agreed to “truthfully and completely disclose all information with respect to the activities of [myself] and others.” Those others include his former business partners, Menendez, and his wife. The plea deal involved Uribe pleading guilty to seven counts including bribery, conspiracy to commit fraud, and obstruction of justice.
Jeremy Yurow, a journalist with USA Today, explained Menendez’s attorneys’ strategy to keep their client out of jail: “They may seek to introduce elements of Menendez’s personal history, citing family trauma and psychological factors as potential mitigating factors. Additionally, they may attempt to shift some blame onto Menendez’s wife, Nadine.”
Selling out his wife to protect his own skin was covered back in April at The New American. It was an “alternate” strategy being developed by Menendez’s attorneys and not made public until a court allowed it to be revealed:
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….
[Instead] they may inculcate [incriminate] 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.
This is in character for Menendez, who has a long history of corruption and skating by selling out his friends. As The New American noted:
This isn’t the first time that Menendez has sold out his friends to save his own hide. His former “close friend and fundraiser Donald Scarinci” was left hanging by Menendez when it was revealed back in 2006 that Scarinci tried to extort favors from a third party on Menendez’s behalf. Menendez “cut ties” with his former friend immediately and denied that Scarinci was acting for him.
Then there’s Menendez’s former “friend” Dr. Salomon Melgen, a prosperous Miami eye doctor, whom Menendez left hanging out to dry back in 2017. Menendez skated on corruption charges, but his “friend” Melgen was convicted and found guilty of 67 counts of Medicare fraud and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Now Menendez is about to do the same with his wife.
In trying to explain his “strange” behavior about the half a million in cash stuffed into his clothes and $100,000 worth of gold bars found during the exercise of a search warrant at his home during the investigation, Menendez set a record low for “plausible deniability”:
For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.
Now, this may seem old-fashioned. But these were monies drawn from my personal savings account, based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.
Now his attorneys have concocted the strategy of combining “psychological” problems and family “trauma” along with “marital” difficulties in an attempt to keep Menendez from spending the next 45 years of his life in prison.
Defiant to the last, Menendez has claimed that the indictments are robust with claims but skimpy on facts, that he is innocent of all charges, that the DOJ has “poisoned” the jury pool with its assault on his honor and integrity by continually filing expanded charges of corruption against him.
His Democratic “friends” in the Senate, who no doubt have long been aware of Menendez’s corruption, sent him a four-page “public letter of admonition” back in 2018. They are now shunning him, including the junior Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker, who is putting distance between himself and Menendez. Booker, who offered himself as a character witness in a previous corruption trial, said last week that “I’m proud that I spoke to the Menendez I knew then.” (Emphasis added.)
Booker is part of the more than half of the Senate Democratic caucus who called on Menendez to resign back in September when the charges first came to light.
Perhaps as a warning to those former “friends,” Menendez issued this veiled threat in a Senate speech: “I’m innocent — and I intend to prove my innocence, not just for me, but for the precedent this case will set for you and future members of the Senate.”
Menendez’s attorneys definitely will be earning their fees over the next five to eight weeks.
Related articles:
Senator Menendez Caught Trying to Blame His Wife for His Misdeeds
Senator Menendez Enters Not-guilty Plea to New Charges
Additional Charges Filed Against New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez
