U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is seeking a two-month delay of his trial on federal corruption charges, pushing the start until after the 2024 Democratic primary.
“Contrary to the government’s overheated statements to the press, this is far from an open-and-shut case,” Menendez’s attorneys, Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, said in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein on Wednesday.
The trial was scheduled to begin on May 6, but Fee and Weitzman said they couldn’t “meaningfully prepare for trial on the timeline the court set at the initial conference.”
“We do not make this request lightly,” the Menendez attorneys said in their filing. “We are compelled to do so, however, given the complexity of this case—which includes, for example, an unprecedented foreign-agent charge against a sitting Senator based on a statute the government has never-before prosecuted—the volume and timing of the government’s disclosures, and the significant motion practice ahead.”
So far, federal prosecutors have produced more than 6.7 million documents – over 15 million pages – including over 3 million emails and text messages.
“To put the government’s discovery in perspective, the government produced over 735 terabytes of data, which is more than 50 times the size of the entire 26-million-book collection in the Library of Congress,” the lawyers said, noting that classified discovery has not yet begun and they are still seeking clearance to review them. “Review of the government’s discovery — which the government has amassed and reviewed over at least four years — does not begin to approximate the work needed to prepare for trial of this matter.”
Menendez switched lawyers last month, replacing his longtime criminal defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell, with Fee and Weitzman, partners at a New York firm, Paul Hastings.
They also told Stein that they expect to make a multitude of motions in advance of the trial.
Menendez has resisted calls for his resignation from nearly all of the state’s top Democrats and has not yet said if he will seek re-election next year; the campaign for his seat has proceeded without him. Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), First Lady Tammy Murphy, and former Newark school board member Lawrence Hamm have already announced their candidacies.
Former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) has not ruled out running and has discussed his possible candidacy with some Democratic leaders.
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.
Trial delays are not unusual.
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.
Menendez trial seek extension 20 Dec 2023