Bob Menendez’s federal corruption trial is set to begin one month before the 2024 Democratic U.S. Senate primary, but it’s unusual for the first trial date not to face several extensions.
U.S. District Court Judge Sidney H. Stern today scheduled a jury trial for Menendez, his wife, Nadine, and three businessmen for May 6, 2024, in Manhattan.
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.
What today’s news signals is the likelihood that the Democratic primary will come and go before jurors hear the evidence of allegations against Menendez, a U.S. Senator since 2006. The filing deadline comes at the end of March 2024.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York 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 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 state 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, who was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee 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/or DNA of Daibes or his driver,” the indictment says.
RELATED ARTICLES
-
July 16, 2019 -
September 12, 2020 -
October 15, 2019