Sen. Menendez arraigned for third time
NEW YORK — For the third time in six months, Sen. Bob Menendez stood before a judge in Manhattan on Monday to be formally arraigned on charges in an expansive federal bribery case. He pleaded innocent, just as he had twice before.
“Once again — not guilty, your honor,” Menendez told the judge, Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court.
Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, has previously pleaded innocent to accepting bribes in exchange for political favors and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
On Monday, he pleaded innocent to obstruction of justice, a charge added last week in an updated indictment.
His wife, Nadine Menendez, also pleaded innocent to obstructing justice. Two New Jersey businesspeople accused of bribing the couple with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, similarly reiterated their innocent pleas.
The appearance of the four defendants was brief and largely perfunctory, but the senator, 70, and Nadine Menendez, 57, were surrounded by news cameras as they exited the building in silence and climbed into a waiting car.
The new charges come less than two months before the scheduled start of the trial, May 6.
Stein said he intended to hold firm to the planned timeline, but he also suggested a pretrial appeal that could lead to a monthslong delay was possible.
The obstruction of justice charges appear to be related to information provided by Jose Uribe, a former insurance broker accused in September in the bribery conspiracy. Earlier this month, Uribe admitted that he had tried to bribe the senator with a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for Menendez’s efforts to scuttle an insurance fraud investigation in New Jersey.
Uribe, 56, is now cooperating with prosecutors.
He told the judge that he and Nadine Menendez met at a hotel to get their stories straight after he received a subpoena in connection to the case. During that meeting, he said, he agreed to lie to investigators — and to his own lawyer.
The car, according to prosecutors, was one of the first bribes provided for the benefit of the senator and his wife. The Mercedes replaced a vehicle that police records show Nadine Menendez was driving in December 2018 when she struck and killed a pedestrian, Richard Koop, in Bogota, N.J.
Last week’s updated indictment accused the senator and his wife of lying to their lawyers, too, and trying to make it appear as if car payments arranged by Uribe were loans, not bribes.
“Menendez and Nadine Menendez wrote checks and letters falsely characterizing the return of bribe money,” prosecutors wrote in the fourth successive indictment, which increased the number of criminal counts to 18, up from four.
Bob Menendez’s lawyers have said that overzealous prosecutors were criminalizing normal legislative activity and flouting protections afforded to members of Congress by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause. They have filed motions seeking to have the indictment dismissed, and the judge is expected to rule on that request soon.
If Stein does not dismiss the indictment, defendants will be permitted to ask the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in on charges that might relate to the speech or debate clause, according to two lawyers involved in the case.
Short of that, however, Stein indicated that he had no intention of deviating from the May 6 start date.
“The trial is coming up very quickly — I think unjustly quickly,” Lawrence Lustberg, Hana’s lawyer, said outside the courthouse.
Asked Monday if he planned to run for reelection, Menendez noted that he was standing in a courthouse.
“I don’t think announcing it in a courtroom,” he said, “would be the best idea.”