More than a dozen prosecution witnesses have taken the stand in Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial, testifying about gold bars in his home, hush-hush conversations over drinks and cigars, and the unusual pet issues the New Jersey Democrat was pressing in talks with stunned government officials.
Defense attorneys have cast Menendez as a loving yet unwitting husband whose wife, Nadine Menendez (formerly Arslanian), secretly collected gifts from several men who sought the lawmaker’s power and influence. Her trial is scheduled for later this year.
Prosecution witnesses have painted a different picture, one in which Menendez, 70, was a savvy participant in the scheme and communicated directly with the three New Jersey businessmen accused of bribing him.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have begun winding down their presentation to the jury and are expected to rest their case next week. Here are five moments that captured the courtroom’s attention during the trial’s five weeks of testimony to date. All are likely to stick in jurors’ minds once they begin deliberating.
Send in the cash-counting machines
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The government’s opening witness was the agent who led the FBI team that executed search warrants at the Menendez home in 2022. And he had props.
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Aristotelis Kougemitros brought some of the ingots and stacks of cash found in several rooms. Jurors got to feel the weight of the gold as they passed around the bars. Kougemitros donned dark gloves and opened a drawstring bag stuffed with $100,000, slowly displaying it as if it were a game-show prize.
The FBI found so much money stuffed in jackets, boxes, bags, envelopes and a boot — more than $486,000, all told — that reinforcements had to be called in, Kougemitros testified. Two more agents soon arrived with cash-counting machines, he said.
An FBI fingerprint examiner later testified that a cash-filled envelope seized from a safe in Nadine Menendez’s closet bore two sets of fingerprints: the senator’s prints and those of New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes, now a trial co-defendant.
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That envelope was found in the same safe as a dozen gold bars, witnesses said.
‘Stop interfering with my constituent’
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A former high-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture told the jury that he had fielded dozens of phone calls from members of Congress during his government tenure. But only one of those calls included a request that could hurt U.S. economic interests, he said.
Ted McKinney, undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs during the Trump administration, recounted a “curt” 2019 phone conversation with Menendez about a key shift in the market for beef liver exports to Egypt.
The senator mentioned a news article from an Egyptian outlet, McKinney said. It was based on a USDA report that raised concerns about Egypt’s decision to de-authorize several U.S. businesses that certified beef exports to the country as halal. The Egyptian government replaced them with a single New Jersey company, IS EG Halal Certified Inc., that was new to the industry.
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“I felt that … most certainly the U.S. could be harmed,” McKinney testified.
Prosecutors contend that the Egyptians were rewarding IS EG Halal’s owner, Wael “Will” Hana, with a monopoly in exchange for his access to Menendez and the lawmaker’s help securing U.S. military aid despite congressional concerns over Egypt’s human rights record. They also allege that Menendez was profiting indirectly, with Hana, another trial co-defendant, making a payment on Arslanian’s mortgage and giving her a no- or low-show job.
U.S. producers exported about $56 million in frozen beef livers to Egypt in 2018. A big shift in the halal-certification industry would pause exports, harming U.S. producers, McKinney said. But when he tried to discuss trade dynamics with Menendez, the lawmaker was having none of it, McKinney recalled.
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“I will never forget the words — ‘Stop interfering with my constituent,’” McKinney testified Menendez said.
A stakeout at a steakhouse
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Menendez poured the wine during a 2019 dinner at Morton’s steakhouse in Washington, according to photos taken by a couple seated at a nearby table.
They were FBI undercover specialists, dressed to the nines and dispatched to surveil the senator’s party on the restaurant patio. Another FBI employee testified that he waited in a nearby vehicle and shot photos and video as the party exited.
The surveillance team was tracking Hana and Egypt’s top spy in Washington, Gen. Ahmed Helmy, when Menendez and his then-girlfriend showed up at the high-end steakhouse. As the drinks flowed, that table’s conversation became a bit easier to discern, undercover specialist Terrie Williams-Thompson said.
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“They were eating, they were talking, they were laughing, they were smoking,” she said.
“What, if anything, did you hear the woman at the table ask?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz asked.
“She asked, ‘What else can the love of my life do for you?’” Williams-Thompson testified, adding that she couldn’t make out what was said just before or after that remark.
Defense attorney Adam Fee described Menendez as an uber-regular at Morton’s and said there was “nothing unusual or atypical” about him having dinner there with a diplomat. “Our client is at that same restaurant at that same table 250 nights a year,” he said.
Does this ring a bell?
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A New Jersey trucking and insurance executive is the only witness expected to testify that Menendez and his wife agreed to a corrupt deal. And Jose Uribe gave vivid descriptions of his encounters with the senator, at one point telling the jury about a “little bell” he said Menendez used to summon people.
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Uribe, who has pleaded guilty to various state and federal crimes including insurance fraud and tax evasion, said his part of the bargain was financing a new Mercedes-Benz convertible for Arslanian. In exchange, Uribe said, he asked that Menendez use his influence to “stop and kill” criminal investigations by the New Jersey attorney general’s office into several close associates.
As star witness for the prosecution, Uribe’s credibility or lack thereof is sure to be a central question for the jury. Attorneys for Hana and Menendez spent hours confronting him with his past crimes and admitted deceptions.
Prosecutors said the witness’s detailed recollections were corroborated by text messages he had not seen. Uribe described a September 2019 meeting with Menendez on the back patio of Arslanian’s Englewood Cliffs home. When they needed something to write on, the senator summoned Arslanian with a bell, Uribe recalled.
“He yelled … ‘mon amour,’ and there was a bell, a little bell on that table, and he rang the bell,” Uribe said.
How did the bell get there? Was it there when Uribe arrived? How big was it?
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“Is it bigger than my fist or smaller?” Fee asked Uribe as he raised a fist.
“I cannot see the size of your fist,” Uribe replied.
“Why don’t you hold up your fist and tell me?” Fee said.
Prosecutors later called a paralegal to the stand and asked her to read a text Arslanian had sent Daibes about a month before the meeting Uribe described.
“Happy birthday, Fred. It’s two days I am looking for the perfect bell. I have not found it yet, but I will,” she texted.
Prosecutors take the stand
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Menendez is accused of attempting to disrupt New Jersey criminal investigations at both the state and federal levels. The day after that patio meeting with the little bell, Menendez met with the New Jersey attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, who testified that he immediately cut off the senator upon hearing that he wanted to discuss an open investigation pertaining to Hispanic truckers.
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“I didn’t know the case. I didn’t want to know the case,” Grewal said. “I just wanted to move on from the conversation. It’s not something I was comfortable speaking to him about.”
Afterward, Grewal recalled, a top deputy who had been in the room with him and Menendez commented, “Whoa, that was gross.”
Another high-ranking prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger, told the jury that he was the senator’s golfing buddy and a longtime fundraiser for his campaigns. But a case against Daibes came between them.
It first came up in a December 2020 meeting as Sellinger was being vetted for the prosecutor’s job, he said.
“Senator Menendez mentioned that Fred Daibes had a case before the United States attorney’s office, and Senator Menendez believed that he was being treated — he, Mr. Daibes — was being treated unfairly, and Senator Menendez hoped that if I became U.S. attorney that I would look at it carefully,” Sellinger said.
Justice Department officials decided shortly after Sellinger took office in late 2021 that he could have no role in that case. In private practice, Sellinger had represented a client whose interests were “adverse” to Daibes’s interests.
That seemed to sour his relationship with Menendez, according to Sellinger’s testimony. When he called to invite the lawmaker to speak at his investiture ceremony in 2022, he got a cold shoulder, he testified.
As Sellinger recounted: “He said: ‘I’m going to pass. The only thing worse than not having a relationship with the United States attorney is people thinking you have a relationship with the United States attorney and you don’t.’”
