A federal judge has turned down a bid by U.S. Senator Bob Menendez to delay the start of his corruption trial from May 6 to early July.
Stein also rejected Menendez’s request to modify the pretrial motion schedule.
“The fact that discovery has been voluminous is consistent with the parties’ stated expectations on October 2 and does not justify a two-month adjournment of the schedule,” said U.S. District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein in a ruling released today. “In fact, the volume of discovery material is less than defendants were concerned it was when they sought the adjournment on December 20.”
Menendez has not said if he will seek re-election next year. If he does run and Stein sticks to his schedule, Menendez will be on trial for four weeks before the June 4 Democratic primary.
Since Menendez has steadfastly refused to resign, his absence from Washington during his trial would leave Democrats with a thin organizational majority of 50-49 that includes Joe Manchin and independents Krysten Sinema, Bernie Sanders, and Angus King. That could force Vice President Kamala Harris to spend more time in Washington during an election year.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the New Jersey senator, had opposed an extension.
Stein said that an “inadvertent error made by a discovery vendor” led Menendez’s lawyers to believe they had received 735 terabytes of data; they had actually only been sent three terabytes.,
“While three terabytes is concededly a substantial amount of data, it is but a tiny fraction of what defendants believed they had on their plates to digest and is consistent with the expectations voiced at the initial pretrial conference that discovery would be voluminous,” Stein stated.
The government has already turned over most of its discovery to Menendez’s legal team, including 6.7 million documents – over 15 million pages – including over 3 million emails and text messages.
Stein said he expects a “detailed, text-searchable index” that breaks down the documents with “reasonable specificity,” to help Menendez’s lawyers digest the discovery by May 6.
“The Court expects that these measures will aid in defendants’ review of the discovery materials and that the Government will engage in good-faith efforts to assist defendants in navigating the document production upon request,” said Stein. “Indeed, the Government states that it has ‘repeatedly offered to answer any questions the defense may have concerning where to find materials in discovery.’”
Menendez has not yet announced if he will seek re-election to a fourth term next year; the filing deadline is March 25, and the Democratic primary is on June 4, four weeks after the trial is set to begin.
Last week, three sealed documents were placed in the court vault without explanation; that could mean several things, including a plea agreement from one of the defendants.
When Menendez was indicted in April 2015, the original trial date was scheduled for July 13. That was pushed to October 13. In September, federal prosecutors and Menendez’s attorney jointly motioned to vacate the trial date. More than eighteen months later, U.S. District Court Judge William Walls scheduled Menendez’s trial to start in September 2017, nearly two-and-a-half years after the indictment.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Menendez on September 22, accusing him of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for using his Senate post to enrich them.
Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting cash, gold bars, a luxury Mercedes convertible, payments toward a mortgage, home furnishings, and payment for a “low-or-no-show job.”
Prosecutors say that Menendez sought to influence the nomination of a U.S. Attorney who he thought he could influence in the federal prosecution of a longtime friend and donor, Bergen County developer Fred Daibes.
He is additionally charged with seeking to “disrupt” a criminal investigation by the New Jersey attorney general’s office of Jose Uribe, a businessman and associate of the senator.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which conducted the investigation, alleges that Menendez provided sensitive U.S. Government information and other steps to assist the Arab Republic of Egypt secretly and helped Wael Hana obtain a lucrative Halal meat inspection contract with the Egyptian government. They claim that Hana paid bribes to the senator through his wife.
Menendez, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman until his indictment, is also accused of pressuring a U.S. Department of Agriculture official to protect Hana’s deal.
A June 2022 search warrant of Menendez’s home and safe deposit box led federal agents to find over $480,000 in cash – “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe” – and another $70,000 in Nadine Menendez’s safe deposit box. Some of the cash was found in the pockets of Menendez’s clothing.
“Some of the envelopes contained the fingerprints and DNA of Daibes or his driver,” the indictment says.
The filing deadline for the 2024 Democratic primary is March 25. Menendez would also have until the day of the primary, June 4, to file as an independent.