NJ Sen. Bob Menendez’s blockbuster bribery trial goes to jury on Friday with possible prison term at stake

A Manhattan jury is set to start weighing the fate of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez — who is charged with selling out his post as an international affairs bigwig to line his pockets with gold bars and other bribes.

Deliberations are slated to begin Friday in the federal case accusing Menendez, 70, and his wife of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz while protecting and enriching three Garden State businessmen and catering to the Egyptian and Qatari governments.

Manhattan federal Judge Sidney Stein began instructing the jury Thursday afternoon — after the feds again blasted the senator’s brazen strategy to blame his wife Nadine Menendez, 57, for “keeping him in the dark” about asking local businessmen Wael Hana and property mogul Fred Daibes for the payoffs.

Daibes, 66, who is charged alongside the senator, is an Edgewater, New Jersey real estate power broker who has been one of the senator’s closest friends for years, trial evidence revealed.

“Are you going to accept that there was a secret plan to dupe Senator Menendez?” prosecutor Daniel Richenthal told the jury in the final part of the government’s closing statement. “That his wife cooked up a scheme to collect money and gold with two men, one of whom was his close friend, and that he never learned about it?”

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The allegedly crooked former head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee is charged with 16 different felonies, including bribery, extortion, obstructing justice and acting as an illegal foreign agent. The top counts he faces carry a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Menendez, a Democrat, has maintained his innocence — claiming that the feds targeted him because he’s a prominent Latino — and has bucked calls from both Republicans and Democrats to resign.

Wearing a dark blue suit and pink tie at the defense table, the senator frowned and shook his head at several points in court Thursday — including when the prosecutor Richenthal reminded jurors that Menendez secretly ghostwrote a letter urging colleagues to unfreeze $300 million in Egyptian military aid during the time period when he was allegedly “on the take.”

“That’s not the work of a diplomat,” Richenthal said. “That’s the work of a corrupt official.”

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But the senator seemed in higher spirits outside the courthouse, telling reporters, “I look forward to the jury starting tomorrow,” as he stepped into a waiting black Lincoln sedan.

The real estate honcho Daibes and Egypt-born businessman Wael Hana, 40, are charged alongside the senator and are accused of conspiring to shower the Menendezes with gold, cash and even an air purifier and an elliptical machine between 2018 and 2023.

In exchange, Menendez helped ensure that Hana kept a lucrative monopoly on halal meat exports to Egypt — which he was granted despite having no halal experience — and tried to bring up Daibes’ pending federal bank fraud case with New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, the Manhattan feds said.

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The senator also secretly lobbied his colleagues in Congress to soften their stances on Egypt’s human rights issues after Hana connected the senator and his wife with Egyptian officials, trial evidence showed.

“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Nadine Menendez told one Egyptian government official while her husband smoked cigars and swigged red wine at a May 2019 dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse, an FBI agent who secretly observed the scene testified.

Nadine is scheduled to go on trial later this year after her case was severed from her husband’s while she recovers from breast cancer.

A fourth member of the alleged bribery scheme, disgraced insurance broker Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified that he bought Nadine a new Mercedes in exchange for promises that her husband would tamper with state criminal probes into his friends and relatives.

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