New Jersey Senator Indicted for Acting How You’d Imagine a Senator From New Jersey Would Act

Democratic New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez—who was indicted on federal corruption charges in 2015—has been indicted again on federal corruption charges, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

Before Menendez, the most recent senator to face a federal bribery prosecution was New Jersey Sen. Harrison Williams, who was convicted on nine counts of bribery and conspiracy in 1981. In 2002 Democratic New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli abruptly ended his reelection campaign after being “severely admonished” by the Senate for accepting money and gifts from a donor who later went to prison for campaign finance violations.

Menendez’s 2015 indictment involved a Florida-based eye doctor named Salomon Melgen, who had given Menendez expensive gifts and paid for him to take luxury vacations. In return, prosecutors said, Menendez advocated on Melgen’s behalf with public officials, including the secretary of Health and Human Services, after Melgen was accused of defrauding the Medicare system. That case ended in a hung jury and mistrial in 2018, after which prosecutors declined to refile charges in a decision that was seen as being influenced by the Supreme Court’s corruption-related decision in 2016’s McDonnell v. United States. (Apologies for the litany of names and cases, but they’re all relevant to what’s going on now and will culminate in a last-paragraph twist that may or may not be shocking to you, depending on how easily shocked you are.)

In McDonnell, the court vacated the bribery conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell on the grounds that he had not taken a specific, explicit “official act” on behalf of a dietary supplement entrepreneur who’d given him various luxury gifts. McDonnell’s representatives argued successfully that making introductions and setting up meetings for someone wasn’t an official act on their behalf.

In the new Menendez case, though, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York apparently believe they have the goods. According to Friday’s indictment, Menendez and his wife accepted cash, checks, a Mercedes-Benz, a recliner, and gold bars from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for Menendez’s efforts to exert influence in ways that benefited them.

In one case, for instance, Menendez, in his capacity as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, is alleged to have approved the sale of millions of dollars of military equipment to Egypt at the urging of an Egyptian national who was simultaneously paying Nadine Menendez tens of thousands of dollars for work she did not actually perform at his New Jersey–based halal-certification business. In another, Menendez is alleged to have repeatedly pestered figures in the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office to show leniency toward another individual who was being prosecuted for bank fraud. That individual, the feds allege, gave Menendez and his wife a number of bars of gold, whose value the senator showed a keen interest in:

What happens next? Menendez, in a statement, denied that he or his wife has committed any crimes and said he intends to remain in office. He’s up for reelection in 2024, and although he won his race in 2018, MSNBC analyst and longtime New Jersey politics observer Steve Kornacki suggests he could be vulnerable to a primary challenge by a high-profile Democrat like Rep. Josh Gottheimer or Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

Oh, and the big twist! The federal attorney who initially prosecuted McDonnell on corruption charges was Jack Smith—who is now pursuing some even more high-profile cases involving a certain former president, who happens to keep his residence, in the summer months, in New Jersey.