Prosecutors charge Menendez with a dozen new counts
Prosecutors brought a dozen additional charges against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), including obstruction of justice and bribery, after one of the senator’s co-defendants took a plea deal and agreed to cooperate.
Unveiled on Tuesday, the superseding indictment now charges Menendez with a total of 16 criminal counts over allegations he accepted luxurious bribes in exchange for his political influence and acted as an agent of the Egyptian government.
Menendez pleaded not guilty to the previous rounds of charges and has brushed off calls to resign from the Senate.
Many of the new counts involve alleged schemes with three New Jersey businessmen already brought to light in the senator’s previous indictments, but prosecutors now charge Menendez directly with bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent rather than merely bringing conspiracy charges.
The new charging documents follow the recent guilty plea of Jose Uribe, one of three businessmen charged alongside Menendez and his wife, Nadine. The other businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, also face new charges.
Prosecutors allege that Menendez told his attorneys to tell the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in June and September about his knowledge of a more than $23,000 payment Hana made toward Nadine Menendez’s mortgage and the funds Uribe paid toward the Mercedes-Benz convertible.
The New Jersey Democrat also allegedly urged his counsel to tell the prosecuting office that he later learned the funds were loans.
“In truth and in fact, and as Menendez well knew, Menendez had learned of both the mortgage company payment and the car payments prior to 2022, and they were not loans, but bribe payments,” prosecutors wrote in the updated indictment.
The latest indictment also details a previously unknown meeting between Daibes and Menendez’s wife, Nadine.
Prosecutors say Nadine Menendez asked Daibes what he would say to law enforcement about the payments he had made for the Mercedes-Benz Convertible if asked, to which he suggested he’d say the payments had been a loan. Nadine Menendez said that “sounded good,” according to the updated indictment.
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