Sen. Bob Menendez remains defiant in face of bribery indictment

In the face of increasing calls for his resignation, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., says he isn’t going anywhere. Calling his indictments on bribery and corruption charges a smear campaign, he said he will fight the charges.

Six of New Jersey’s members of the U.S. House, all Democrats, have called on him to resign. Two more have issued statements saying the charges were concerning and “undermine the sacred trust Americans place in their elected officials.” Only one has issued a statement in support of the senator: his son, Rep. Rob Menendez, D-Jersey City. The New Jersey Globe reports that the younger Menendez appears to be the “only prominent politician anywhere in the country” to publicly stand behind the senator.

Tuesday morning, New Jersey’s junior senator, Cory Booker, a Democrat and close ally to Menendez, broke his silence and also called on Menendez to resign. He joins at least a dozen other Democratic senators calling for Menendez’s resignation. As of the time of publication for this article, Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Jon Tester, Mont., Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., Peter Welch, D-Vt., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, John Fetterman, D-Pa., Bob Casey, D-Pa., Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Ed Markey, D-Mass., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., have all called on Menendez to step down.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also said that Menendez should resign. She called for Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., to resign after he was indicted earlier this year and said the issue should not be partisan.

“Consistency matters. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat. The details in this indictment are extremely serious. They involve the nature of, not just his, but all of our seats in Congress,” she said, according to The Hill.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also said it would “probably be a good idea” if Menendez resigned.

Related

• Sen. Bob Menendez steps down as Foreign Relations chair after bribery indictment

• New Jersey governor calls for Sen. Menendez to resign after bribery indictment

What’s in the indictment?

The indictment released last week alleges that Menendez, his wife Nadine Arslanian and three New Jersey businessmen — Wael Hana, Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes — were involved in bribery schemes. The couple “accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from Hana, Uribe, and Daibes in exchange for Menendez’s agreement to use his official position to protect and enrich them and to benefit the government of Egypt,” the Justice Department said in a release.

Prosecutors allege that the acts of corruption included pressuring a senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to protect a business monopoly of Hana’s, and recommending that the president nominate a U.S. attorney that Menendez believed he could influence and disrupting criminal prosecutions of Uribe and Daibes.

They also allege Menendez used his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit Egypt. As part of the bribery scheme, Menendez sent sensitive information regarding the number and nationality of persons serving at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, to Egyptian officials, ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of Egypt to other U.S. senators advocating for them to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt and signed off on foreign military sales to Egypt totaling approximately $2.5 billion.

“Anytime you need anything, you have my number and we will make everything happen,” Arslanian texted one Egyptian official seeking Menendez’s influence in a 2020 dispute over the building of a dam in Ethiopia, according to the indictment.

Close to half-a-million dollars in cash was found in the Menendez home, and more than $100,000 worth of gold bars. Menendez on Monday said that it was his personal cash, withdrawn over 30 years and kept in his home for safe keeping. However, the Justice Department noted that the cash found by investigators had the fingerprints and DNA of Daibes, and the unique serial numbers on some of the gold bars trace back to Hana.

How is it different than his last indictment?

In 2015, Menendez was indicted over bribery charges related to his dealings with his friend Salomon Melgen, a wealthy ophthalmologist. The indictment alleged that Menendez used his office to benefit one of Melgen’s businesses and tried to intervene in a Medicare fraudulent billing investigation into Melgen.

In return, Melgen provided Menendez with campaign contributions, luxury vacations and private jet travel. The case ended in a mistrial with a hung jury, and Menendez was eventually acquitted. Significantly, his trial defense didn’t deny the actions he had taken to benefit Melgen, but rather argued they were acts of friendship, not responses to bribes. Melgen was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison in a separate case concerning health care fraud. President Donald Trump commuted Melgen’s sentence in January 2021 as one of his final acts in office.

Prosecutors in the previous case relied largely on circumstantial evidence, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. This time, there are thousands of text messages and email communications that communicate “in explicit fashion” the alleged bribery and gifts, making the case “different from top to bottom.”

The investigation remains ongoing and the defendants in this indictment remain innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Holly Richardson is the editor of Utah Policy