Bribery Defense Déjà Vu In Menendez Trial

NEW YORK — When Sen. Bob Menendez stood trial on corruption charges in 2017, he claimed the lavish vacations and private jet flights he received from a friend and political donor weren’t bribes — they were gifts. It worked, with jurors failing to convict him.

Now, as New Jersey’s senior senator faces another trial in federal court, his co-defendants are employing the same legal maneuver. Only they’re not accused of flying the senator to exotic locales. Instead, prosecutors say they plied Menendez and his wife with a luxury car, gold bars and piles of cash.

“At the end of the day, what the government is trying to do here … is to criminalize gift-giving,” Lawrence Lustberg, an attorney for one of Menendez’s two co-defendants, Wael “Will” Hana, said at the start of the current trial. “Don't let them say that every gift is a bribe.”

Lawyers for Hana and the other co-defendant, North Jersey developer Fred Daibes, have not denied giving the senator and his wife piles of cash and gold bars. But they say that prosecutors have overstated their meaning.

That’s the same argument made six years ago by lawyers for Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor and longtime Menendez friend and donor.

There are key differences between the trials, but in the best-case scenario for Menendez his political career is now ruined by the generosity of friends piquing prosecutors’ interest. In the worst-case scenario, he’ll soon be heading to prison.

In Menendez’s 2017 trial, attorneys said that the senator and Melgen had been longtime friends. So they argued that the doctor’s private jet flights, lavish hotel stays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations were not why Menendez had gone to bat for the doctor’s business interests.

At the end of the trial, an attorney for Melgen made a plea to the jury.

“Is there, in this case, a duffel bag stuffed with cash somewhere?” the doctor’s attorney said. “No,” he said, answering his own question, “there’s none of that.”

But this time around, federal investigators found a black duffel bag stuffed with $133,000 in cash during a search of the senator’s home office.

That 2022 search of Menendez and his wife’s home also turned up cash inside boots, jackets with the senator’s name on them, a plastic bag and a safe, which also contained gold bars.

Prosecutors say at least some of the cash and gold, along with mortgage and car payments that benefited the Menendezes, were bribes from a trio of New Jersey business people to the senator, who put his power up for sale.

Hana and Daibes both argue they, too, are longtime friends with Menendez or his wife, Nadine Menendez.

Hana and Nadine Menendez were “like brother and sister,” Lustberg told jurors in his opening statement.

Daibes and Menendez have been “genuine friends for more than three decades,” Daibes’ attorney César de Castro said, adding that the developer “likes to gift gold.”

“Mr. Daibes is not going to deny that the money and gold that the government has connected to him was given by him,” de Castro told the jury. “Yes, gold bars were given by him. Yes, cash was given by him. But what we do challenge is that gold or money was given to pay Senator Menendez to engage in any official senatorial acts.”

Neither Hana nor Daibes have detailed how much they gave and when, but it’s a similar claim from the opening statements of Menendez’s 2017 corruption trial. Defense attorneys worked then to convince jurors that prosecutors were misinterpreting gifts Menendez got from Melgen, who was such a good friend he was considered family.

“I’m here to tell you that every single thing my client shared with his friend and every single political contribution he gave was out of friendship done out of sincere belief that Senator Menendez was good for this country,” the attorney, Kirk Ogrosky, said at the time.

During that trial, a defense attorney asked Rob Menendez — the senator’s son who is now himself a member of Congress — how he knew Melgen. He said he’d known Melgen since he was a child and referred to him as “doc,” “Dr. Melgen,” and “also occasionally as tio. It means uncle in Spanish.”

The current trial, however, has some key differences — particularly how Menendez is responding to the alleged gift-giving. In their opening statements, Menendez’s defense team has not acknowledged that the senator received these items. Instead, they are arguing that at least some of the cash was his own and that the gold and other cash was found in “Nadine’s closet.”

Menendez has said he keeps cash on hand because of his family’s history in Cuba, where the government confiscated property.

Avi Weitzman, one of Menendez’s attorneys in this case, told jurors that the cash and gold bars “smells a bit weird,” but he said evidence would show “innocent explanations” for both.

Weitzman said Nadine Menendez had financial concerns she “kept from Bob.” He also thought some of the gold was her family gold, not given to her by Daibes. The cash, Weitzman said, had been withdrawn over the course of decades by Bob Menendez, whose grandfather was a Cuban refugee who fled with nothing except for cash hidden in a grandfather clock.

That’s a sharp contrast to Menendez’s approach to the 2017 trial.

“This case isn’t really about what happened, it’s about why it happened,” Menendez’s then-attorney Abbe Lowell said at the time.

The nature of what was given by Hana and Daibes is also in dispute. Prosecutors say Hana paid off Nadine Menendez’s mortgage payment as a bribe, although his attorneys described it as a loan. What prosecutors call a bribe in the form of a low- or no-show job for Nadine at Hana’s company was, Hana’s attorneys argue, a legitimate job from which Nadine was fired.

And while prosecutors unsuccessfully relied on circumstantial evidence to connect Menendez to bribes in the 2017 trial, this time they have a star witness in Jose Uribe, who was initially charged in the case and has pleaded guilty to bribery charges. Little is known about Uribe, a business person in the trucking and insurance industry. But prosecutors say he offered bribes to Menendez to help disrupt a state criminal case and would give first-hand accounts of the alleged crimes.

“He will give you an inside look at one part of the bribery scheme,” said federal prosecutor Lara Pomerantz during opening statements.