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U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) speaks to the media as he exits Manhattan federal court on July 16, 2024, in New York City. Menendez and his wife Nadine are accused of taking bribes of gold bars, a luxury car, and cash in exchange for using Menendez's position to help the government of Egypt and other corrupt acts according to an indictment from the Southern District of New York. The jury found Menendez guilty on all counts. (Adam Gray | Getty Images)
Lawyers for Sen. Bob Menendez have asked a federal judge to vacate his recent corruption conviction or grant him a new trial, saying prosecutors failed to prove New Jersey’s senior senator sold his office for cash, gold bars, a luxury car, and other valuables.
In a brief filed Monday, attorneys Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman rehashed many of the same arguments they made during the 10-week trial in Manhattan, insisting the conviction was “unjust” because his actions were the normal and constitutionally protected actions of a federal lawmaker and that trial testimony was “speculation masked as inference.”
“Simply put, the government did not show any use of Senator Menendez’s official powers to benefit any of the supposed bribe givers, let alone an agreement to do so in exchange for bribes,” they wrote. “If sustained on such a surprisingly thin reed of evidence, these convictions will make terrible, dangerous law. All of Senator Menendez’s convictions must be reversed .”
They called his conviction as a foreign agent under the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act “unprecedented.” Prosecutors had charged Menendez, who at the time of his indictment last fall chaired the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with acting to benefit the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
“We have been unable to identify — and the government has not cited — a single prosecution of any public official for violating this statute since its adoption in 1966,” they wrote. “One would expect such extraordinary charges to be supported by extraordinary evidence. Not so.”
The Democratic senator’s actions at issue in the trial were permissible political activities and don’t support a conviction under that act , which requires evidence that Menendez took certain actions “at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal,” they argued.
“If it were otherwise, FARA would effectively criminalize congressional service,” the attorneys wrote.
They repeated their complaint that the trial should have happened in New Jersey, not New York, and a judge’s decision to keep it in the Southern District of New York “stretched the Constitution’s venue requirements beyond their breaking point.”
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.
Monday’s filing comes on Menendez’s last day in office after a decades-long career in public service. The three-term senator, 70, announced last month he would resign on Aug. 20, and on Friday withdrew his bid for reelection as an independent candidate.
It also comes just over two months before he’s expected to return to Manhattan for sentencing. He and his co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, are scheduled to appear before federal Judge Sidney H. Stein for sentencing on Oct. 29. All three face decades behind bars.
Hana, a halal meat exporter, and Daibes, an Edgewater real estate developer, also filed briefs Monday challenging their convictions. Co-defendant Jose Uribe, who pleaded guilty and testified against the senator at trial, is also scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 29.
Stein indefinitely postponed the trial of the senator’s wife, Nadine, who also was charged, because she is getting treated for breast cancer.
Menendez, Hana, and Daibes were convicted on all counts in an 18-count federal indictment that accused the men of plying the senator and his wife with valuables between 2018 and 2022 in exchange for the senator using his influence to help the men evade criminal troubles and profit in their international business pursuits. It was the senator’s second corruption trial; his first ended in a mistrial in 2017 after jurors deadlocked.
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