Position of influence
Bob Menendez isn’t just any senator. From his perch as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez had huge sway over decisions to continue − or sometimes withhold − hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Egypt and other countries, as well as billions more in weapons sales and financing.
The senator, according to prosecutors, wielded that influence to benefit the Egyptian government and himself. The indictment alleges that from at least January 2018 through at least June 2022, when the FBI conducted search warrants, Menendez, Arslanian and Hana “willfully and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated and agreed together and with each other” to have Menendez act as an agent of the government of Egypt and Egyptian officials.
For decades, Egypt had been a stalwart U.S. ally in one of the world’s most volatile regions − and a top recipient of American aid.
However, the relationship has deteriorated sharply in recent years over U.S. concerns about Egypt’s human rights record; the government of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, who took power in a military coup, holds an estimated 60,000 political prisoners.
Prosecutors accuse the senator of sharing non-public information on personnel at the U.S. embassy in Cairo with his then-girlfriend, who allegedly got the information to an Egyptian official through Hana. They say he secretly helped draft a letter for the Egyptian government aimed at convincing his fellow senators to release $300 million in aid. Menendez allegedly instructed his wife to tell Hana he was going to sign off on a $99 million arms deal.
Around 2022, Menendez sent his wife a news article on pending military sales to Egypt worth about $2.5 billion. She forwarded it to Hana with a message: “Bob had to sign off on this.”
Further immersing himself in Egyptian affairs, the senator pushed U.S. diplomats to engage in negotiations that had stalled between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over an Ethiopian mega-dam on the Nile River, prosecutors say.
Nadine Menendez was the apparent go-between in the alleged conspiracy. Around March of 2020, prosecutors say, she texted an Egyptian official with a bold reassurance: “Anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen.”
Laufman, who served as the Justice Department’s counterintelligence chief from 2014 to 2018, said that the allegations against Menendez are “exceedingly concerning,” especially given his position as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
He was skeptical of Menendez’s claim that he was acting in his official capacity in his dealings with Egyptian officials.
It’s common and accepted practice, especially for someone on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to interact with foreign government officials and to take good-faith positions that they believe are in U.S. interests, Laufman told USA TODAY.
“Those debates happen all the time. Those are all valid expressions of disagreement and of a healthy democracy,” Laufman said. “But he’s alleged to have done something more than that by acting, as alleged, in the interest of Egyptian military and intelligence officials to influence U.S. government action on behalf of Egypt in ways that he concealed and for remuneration. And that’s a gigantic horse of a different color.” ute has never been used before the Menendez case.
“Utilizing this law,” he said, “signals that the Department of Justice continues to aggressively enforce both FARA but also all laws that are connected to the issue of foreign influence.”
Using the “foreign agent” statutes to charge a sitting senator with acting as an agent of a foreign government “is totally unprecedented,” said Ryan Fayhee, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterespionage section, “even if, as we’ve seen over the years, the use of the FARA statutes is really evolving and becoming part of the toolkit that prosecutors use.”
Ironically, prosecutors say the senator made multiple requests between 2020 and 2022 for the Justice Department to investigate an alleged FARA violation by a group including a former member of Congress − an apparent reference to David Rivera, a one-term Florida Republican arrested last year on money laundering and foreign agent charges related to his consulting work for the Venezuelan government and its state oil company.
While Menendez, a longtime opponent of Venezuela’s socialist government, favored using FARA against Rivera, he also single-handedly shot down a 2020 attempt by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to strengthen the foreign agent law. Grassley’s bill would have increased penalties for violations and required reviews of exemptions to the registration requirement.
Business as usual?
Menendez and his co-defendants have denied wrongdoing, and the senator has suggested that it’s still business as usual for him on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even though he was forced to step down from the chairmanship after charges were filed.
“I still have all my intelligence credentials,” Menendez said on New Jersey PBS’s Chatbox with David Cruz show, adding that he still attends regular committee briefings, including on the IsraelHamas war.
Five days after that interview, one of Menendez’s fellow Democrats, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution that would strip any senator facing such charges of their committee assignments, prohibit them from accessing classified information or classified briefings and bar them from requesting earmarks or using official funds for international travel.
“When you find gold bars stuffed in a mattress, the jokes write themselves. But our national security isn’t funny, it’s often life or death,” Fetterman said. “The Senate has an obligation to its constituents and this country to do everything it can to protect national security, and that means making sure that senators who are currently indicted for acting as agents of foreign powers don’t have access to our most sensitive national secrets.”
Former Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., told USA TODAY that the charges against Menendez should raise alarms about whether he was secretly helping Egypt secure U.S. military aid even as he was allegedly getting paid under the table to help the Sisi government.
“I’m sure that Bob Menendez did not single-handedly stand in the way of more restrictions on Egypt. But he was a key person in the room when these things were being negotiated” in Congress, said Malinowski, a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “Knowing now that there’s evidence he was involved in a corrupt relationship with the government we were trying to hold accountable is very troubling.”