US senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of bribery, following a long-running trial in which the senior Democrat from New Jersey was accused of accepting gold bars, a Mercedes car and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to act on behalf of business associates and foreign governments.
In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, a New York jury convicted the 70-year-old — who once chaired the powerful Senate foreign relations committee — on all 16 counts. His co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes were also found guilty.
The conviction is a vindication for federal prosecutors, who first tried the influential senator on corruption charges in 2015, when he had been accused of accepting almost $1mn in bribes from a Florida ophthalmologist in exchange for intervening in Medicare billing disputes and supporting the visa applications of several of his co-defendant’s girlfriends.
A jury deadlocked and was unable to reach a verdict in that case, and the charges were dropped in 2018.
Menendez was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1992, and became a US senator in 2006. After he was indicted he declined to seek re-election in November’s polls as a Democrat. However, he filed paperwork last month to run as an independent.
His term does not expire until January and he has remained in the Senate even as his case was pending, although he did resign from his position on the foreign relations committee.
On Tuesday, a growing number of Menendez’s Senate colleagues called for his resignation. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said: “In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign.” That was echoed by Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the judiciary committee.
New Jersey’s Democratic governor Phil Murphy on Tuesday reiterated his call for Menendez to step down, saying he “broke the law, violated the trust of his constituents and betrayed his oath of office”. If Menendez did not leave willingly, Murphy said, senators should expel him.
In the indictment, prosecutors said the senator had conspired to act as a foreign agent on behalf of the Egyptian government, one of the largest recipients of US military aid.
Among other things, Menendez was alleged to have personally drafted a letter in 2018 that was later sent by an Egyptian lobbyist to senators, imploring them to remove a hold on $300mn worth of military aid to the Arab state. Prosecutors also accused him of influencing a US government official to help protect Hana’s monopoly over halal food exports to Egypt, and of attempting to influence an investigation by the New Jersey attorney-general.
In updated charges filed earlier this year, prosecutors alleged Menendez had agreed to help Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer, who was seeking a multimillion-dollar investment from a Qatari fund with close ties to Doha, in exchange for gold, furniture and cash.
Menendez made a number of public statements supporting Qatar while on the foreign relations committee, calling the country’s rulers his “friends and allies” and “moral exemplars”, and supported a resolution favouring the Gulf state, prosecutors said.
Menendez, who did not testify at trial, had initially dismissed the latest indictment as a “smear campaign” and sought to suggest the findings in his home were just generous gifts from friends, not illegal bribes.
“Friends do not give friends envelopes stuffed with $10,000 in cash just out of friendship,” assistant US attorney Paul Monteleoni said during closing arguments last week. “Friends do not give friends kilogramme bars of gold . . . out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Menendez’s defence lawyer Adam Fee countered that “Bob’s family fled Cuba with nothing more than the cash they stored in their grandfather’s clock” and that this experience had an “impact” on the politician.
“That explains why Bob was doing what he was doing, because everyone in his family was basically hoarding cash, it was like a habit,” he said.
During the weeks-long trial, Menendez, who was found to have more than $480,000 in cash in a raid on his home last summer, sought to blame his wife, Nadine, arguing that she “kept him in the dark” on financial matters. She has also been charged but has not yet stood trial.
The gold bars were obtained by Nadine, who is of Lebanese and Armenian descent, Fee said, adding: “It is not atypical in these communities to have gold in the home.”
Sentencing has been set for October 29.
Damian Williams, the US attorney for Manhattan, said in a statement, “This wasn’t politics as usual; this was politics for profit. Because Senator Menendez has now been found guilty, his years of selling his office to the highest bidder have finally come to an end.”
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