Early motions could give clues to Menendez strategy
For the second time in his career, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez will face a trial over bribery and corruption charges on Monday.
With jury selection expected to take a few days, voters will soon see how the New Jersey Democrat’s defense unfolds in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan.
The federal charges filed against Menendez in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York include bribery and extortion to benefit Egypt and Qatar. Menendez has been charged – in four successive indictments – alongside his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, and three businessmen – including one who has already pleaded guilty.
Menendez and his wife allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars, gold bars and a luxury car in bribes from Wael Hana, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe in exchange for helping them enrich themselves and trying to help them resolve legal troubles.
More than $480,000 in cash was found stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets and a safe at Menendez’s home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, during a search by investigators in June 2022, the indictment says. They also found more than $70,000 in Arslanian Menendez’s safe deposit box. The indictment includes photos of cash that was stuffed into clothes, including a windbreaker with Menendez’s name stitched on it.
Some of the envelopes contained the fingerprints or DNA of Daibes – a New Jersey developer and longtime political donor to Menendez – or Daibes’ driver, the indictment says.
Agents also found home furnishings provided by Hana and Daibes and a luxury vehicle paid for by Uribe parked in the garage. They also discovered gold bars worth more than $100,000 in the home, provided by Hana or Daibes, according to the indictment.
Since the first indictment last September, thousands of pages and countless motions were filed by prosecutors and all defendants, lawyers were dropped and added, a plea deal was struck, and a surprising and still unknown medical diagnosis for Arslanian Menendez resulted in a separate trial for her.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein will oversee the trial, which begins Monday at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Jury selection can normally take a day or two, but in high-profile cases, especially ones that include politicians, the process can be more complicated, experts say.
Menendez shouldn’t have a hard time finding jurors in New York, said Mitchell Epner, an attorney with Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner who has 30 years of experience with government enforcement, compliance and white-collar litigation.
“He’s famous in New Jersey,” Epner said. “The jury pool from the Southern District of New York, my guess is north of 50% will have never heard of him.”
Blair Zwillman, a past president of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey who has practiced in the Garden State since 1982, expects that the defendants will all have hired consultants to help determine what characteristics to look for in potential jurors, such as people who wouldn’t “necessarily find these actions as crimes” – and, for Menendez, possibly people with “similar immigrant backgrounds.”
Christopher Adams, a Monmouth County-based attorney and also a past president of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey, said there will likely be three strategies used by Menendez’s team, based on what it has done in the run-up to the trial.
The first, Adams said, could highlight Menendez’s “heritage regarding storing money and not trusting banks,” which will likely come with expert testimony “regarding trauma from his childhood that his parents instilled in him about being distrustful about banks and the government.”
The second strategy could focus on what is considered appropriate conduct by a senator – including lobbying efforts – and the third would be “pointing the finger at his wife, what she may have done unbeknownst to him and deals she may have made.”
Adams said that with the trials for Menendez and his wife and co-defendant, Arslanian Menendez, now separated, that strategy could be easier than if the pair had been tried together.
He also predicted that Menendez’s attorneys will try the “tried and true defense strategy of attacking the cooperators.”
Efforts to seek dismissal of the evidence that was found through warrants is standard practice, so Adams was not surprised to see those efforts. But he said motions filed at the beginning of the trial “will give an idea on how this is going to play out.”
“It’s my understanding that the government has basically dumped all their documents as an exhibit list that shows that they’re either trying to bury their strongest evidence so that the defense can’t attack it easily or that they weren’t ready for this trial start,” Adams said. “I think it’s the latter, because it’s very unlike that U.S. Attorney’s Office to not streamline their exhibits. Instead, they have tens of thousands of exhibits.”
Federal prosecutors will face a challenge in presenting evidence and connecting it to the narrative advanced in their indictments, defense attorneys said.
“Prosecutors are keenly aware of the fact that in order to prove this type of case, they’ve got to time-connect a political act to a specific payment,” Zwillman said.
“In any criminal case, a defense attorney or good defense team typically will not put their client on the stand. Menendez
would have a lot of explaining to do, because the circumstances are unusual, a senator having gold bars in his house. … How do you explain that? The testimony is key, and obviously when a defendant takes the stand, an adept prosecutor will do everything he or she can to try to destroy the credibility of the defendant.”
Menendez was also indicted in 2017. That investigation probed ties between Menendez and his longtime friend and donor Salomon Melgen. The two stood trial in federal court in connection with alleged favors given to Melgen after he paid for trips and expenses for Menendez.
In that case, Menendez was accused of taking campaign donations and lavish trips from Melgen, a south Florida ophthalmologist. Menendez denied that the benefits from Melgen were bribes and said the gifts came from a longtime personal friend. The senator’s trial ended in a mistrial after that jury voted 10-2 for acquittal. Prosecutors eventually chose not to retry the case.
“All you need is one juror to not believe without a reasonable doubt, and that’s what happened last time,” Epner said. “The defense just needs to poke enough holes.”
Epner said it’s a very real possibility with multiple defendants that someone will agree to plead guilty at the eleventh hour.
“If the U.S. Attorney’s Office gets two convictions, a hung jury or an acquittal for Menendez, that’s a loss for them,” Epner said. “But if they get a conviction for Menendez and the other two guys get sweetheart plea deals, the trial is a tremendous victory for them.”
If Hana and Daibes were being tried alone, it would be serious, Epner said.
“But they pale in comparison to a sitting United States senator,” he said.
Uribe changed his plea from not guilty to guilty on seven counts, including conspiracy to commit bribery and wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced June 14.
According to a plea agreement, he could face up to 95 years in prison, though he could win leniency by cooperating and testifying against the other defendants, which he has agreed to do. The seven-page plea agreement was signed by Uribe and his attorney on March 1.