U.S. Senator Bob Menendez’s legal team is asking District Judge Sidney Stein to throw out the superseding indictment filed against him last week, arguing that many of the allegations and charges contained within target “constitutionally immune” conduct that cannot “form the basis for, or even be included in, a criminal indictment.”
Menendez has been federally charged with a wide variety of crimes, including accepting bribes in exchange for influence in the Senate and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the government of Egypt. The new indictment filed last week adds additional allegations that Menendez took actions benefiting the government of Qatar in exchange for gifts.
But in the motion to dismiss they filed today, Menendez’s attorneys argue that the senator’s conduct is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, and that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling in McDonnell v. United States further protects actions taken without an explicit quid pro quo.
“Put simply, the Indictment fails to navigate the legal path between McDonnell’s insistence on official conduct and the Constitution’s immunity for legislative action,” the motion reads. “Stripping out both, its (legally insufficient) unofficial acts and its (constitutionally protected) legislative ones leaves no adequate factual foundation to support the requisite quid pro quo for the Indictment’s bribery counts.”
Much of the motion repeats the denials that Menendez has already made, including in remarks delivered on the Senate floor yesterday: that he has accepted no bribes, that he is loyal only to the United States, and that the government has deliberately attempted to craft a sensational indictment in order to sink Menendez in the arena of public opinion.
“The government substitutes made-for-tabloid images of cash and gold bars for actual evidence of a bribery scheme, and manufactures a narrative based on speculation, cherry-picking, and innuendo,” the motion reads. “The cash reflects decades of documented withdrawals by the Senator from his own bank account, most of which occurred years before any of the alleged bribery payments. And the gold bars in question will be shown to be entirely unrelated to any actions on the part of the Senator.”
According to the motion, Menendez’s legal team will release further material targeting the basis of the indictment on January 15.
“These legal defects are only the beginning of the problems with the Indictment,” the motion reads. “As we will detail in additional motions to be filed by January 15, the defects with the Indictment go much further, as the Indictment was filed in an improper district and prejudicially groups separate schemes into single conspiracy counts. These separate defects further warrant dismissal.”
Menendez was first charged with bribery in September 2023, with a superseding indictment filed in October and another one last week. His trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, after an effort to delay it until July was rejected.