Sen. Menendez did not disclose riches he calls gifts, Senate ethics counsel testifies

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 27: Senator Bob Menendez and his wife Nadine Menendez arrive at a Manhattan court after they were indicted on bribery charges on September 27, 2023 in New York City. The couple are accused of receiving money and other gifts in a corrupt relationship with three New Jersey businessmen. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Attorneys defending Sen. Bob Menendez in his ongoing corruption trial have insisted the valuables that prosecutors call bribes were actually gifts and loans.

But under the Senate’s longstanding ethics rules, New Jersey’s senior senator was obligated to report the gold bars, luxury car, mortgage payments, cash, and other items as either income, assets, gifts, or liabilities, the Senate’s ethics director told jurors Thursday on the 25th day of Menendez’s federal bribery trial in Manhattan.

Shannon Kopplin is chief counsel and staff director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics. She told jurors Menendez called her in February 2022, at the direction of the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware), to ask about reporting gold bars on his annual disclosure forms. He told her the gold belonged to his wife, Nadine, whom he’d married in October 2020, and he wondered if he had to amend his 2020 disclosure form to include it, Kopplin said. He’d initially filed the form seven months after his wedding, when it was due in May 2021.

“My impression was that he had recently learned of it,” she said of multiple one-kilogram and one-ounce gold bars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Kopplin said yes and walked him through what he had to do, she testified. In mid-March 2022, he filed the amendment, records show.

That was three months before FBI agents in June 2022 searched the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home and seized 13 gold bars and more than $486,000 in cash.

Federal prosecutors last September indicted the senator, his wife, and three North Jersey businessmen, accusing the couple’s co-defendants — halal meat exporter Wael Hana, real estate developer Fred Daibes, and failed insurance broker Jose Uribe — of giving them cash and items worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as bribes in exchange for the senator’s influence. Uribe pleaded guilty and testified against the others, who have denied the allegations against them.

Under questioning Thursday by prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Kopplin told jurors her committee’s rules require senators to annually report income, assets worth more than $1,000, liabilities of more than $10,000, and gifts valued at $415 or more. The rules also apply to senators’ spouses, although a slightly less detailed level of disclosure is required, she said.

Defense attorneys have insisted a $67,000-plus convertible Mercedes-Benz from Uribe and over $20,000 in mortgage payments from Hana were personal loans, showing checks the couple wrote — six months after investigators searched and seized evidence from their home — to repay the men. The cash and gold Daibes and Hana gave the couple, which prosecutors say totaled tens of thousands of dollars, were gifts from dear friends known for their generosity, the defense team said.

But if they were gifts and loans, Menendez was required to report them under the Senate’s ethics rules — and did not, Kopplin said.

Menendez did, though, report $13,000 worth of wedding gifts — including $1,000 from Philip Sellinger, whom Menendez subsequently recommended to President Biden to nominate as New Jersey’s next U.S. attorney, the disclosures show.

Under cross-examination by Menendez attorney Avi Weitzman, Kopplin agreed the Senate ethics manual is more than 500 pages and her office fields thousands of calls a year from people seeking clarity about disclosure rules.

“Fair to say there’s some complexity to disclosure? This isn’t simple stuff,” Weitzman asked.

Kopplin agreed it wasn’t simple, but added: “I don’t consider it complex either. It’s easier than income taxes. The first report’s the hardest.”

Menendez filed required disclosure reports every year since he joined the Senate in 2006, she added.

Earlier Thursday, Richenthal read several stipulated facts into the record of what an unnamed Egyptian official would testify, if called, that showed Egyptian officials were becoming disillusioned by Hana soon after they gave him a monopoly in 2019 on exporting halal beef to Egypt, dropping the four U.S. halal certifiers that had been serving the Arab country. Prosecutors allege Hana bribed Menendez to help him protect the Egyptian deal.

Richenthal said Egyptian officials were trying to distance themselves from Hana, had directed at least one Egyptian official in the U.S. to stop interacting with him, and decided Hana “wasn’t trustworthy or reliable” after they learned he’d been involved in an insurance scam and had been pocketing money, Richenthal said.

Richenthal did not explain why Egyptian officials expressed those thoughts.

Prosecutors are expected to rest their case Friday. Defense attorneys for Menendez, Hana, and Daibes have said they could take up to two weeks total to present their cases.

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