NEW YORK (AP) — A former U.S. agriculture official on Friday labeled Sen. Bob Menendez as the bad guy in his bribery trial, saying he tried to stop him from disrupting an unusually sudden monopoly that developed five years ago over the certification of meat shipped to India is exported. Egypt.
A jury in federal court in Manhattan heard the official: Ted McKinneytalk about a brief phone call he received from the Democrat in 2019, shortly after New Jersey businessman Wael Hana won the sole right to certify that meat exported from the United States to Egypt met Islamic dietary requirements.
Hana, who is on trial along with Menendez and another businessman, is one of three New Jersey businessmen who prosecutors say gave Menendez and his wife bribes, including gold bars and tens of thousands of dollars in cash, between 2018 and 2022 in exchange for actions by Menendez who would increase their business interests.
Menendez, 70, and his co-defendants, along with his wife — who is scheduled to go to trial in July — have pleaded not guilty to the charges filed against them early last fall.
The monopoly that Hana’s company received displaced several other companies that had certified beef and liver exports to Egypt and took place over a period of several days in May 2019, a rapid transition that seemed “very, very unusual,” McKinney said.
“We took immediate action,” the former official said, describing a series of escalating actions the U.S. took to push Egyptian officials to reconsider the move that granted a monopoly to a single company that had never done the certifications before. The overtures, he said, were met with silence.
Amid the urgent efforts, McKinney called Egypt’s choice a “rather draconian decision” that would drive up prices, McKinney wrote in a correspondence with Egyptian authorities.
He said Menendez called him in late May 2019 and told him to “stop interfering with my constituent.”
In so many words, he added, Menendez told him to “resign.”
McKinney said he began to explain to the senator why the United States preferred multiple companies to one certifying meat sent to Egypt, but Menendez interrupted him.
‘Let’s not worry about that. That is not important. Let’s not go there,” McKinney recalled Menendez telling him as he tried to explain that a monopoly would cause high prices and jeopardize the 60 percent share of the beef and liver market that the U.S. has in Egypt had hands.
He described the senator’s tone during the call as “serious or perhaps even very serious.”
McKinney said he knew Menendez held a powerful position at the time as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he told diplomats in Egypt and within his department to continue gathering facts about why Egypt abruptly changed his policy.
He said he told them to keep doing what they were doing, and if there was any heat at all, I would take it.
“We thought something terrible was happening,” he said.
McKinney said he was preparing to contact the senator for a second time to discuss his concerns when he learned the FBI was investigating how meat certification for Egypt ended up in the hands of one company.
He said he had warned others in his department and diplomats abroad to resign.
“It’s in the hands of the FBI now,” McKinney told them.
What was likely to be a lengthy cross-examination of McKinney began late Friday with a lawyer for Menendez making the case that it was Egypt’s right to choose which company or companies provided the certification of meat shipped from the United States to Egypt was exported. The lawyer emphasized that Egypt came to the conclusion that the companies that had handled certifications had not done so properly.
As Menendez left the courthouse Friday, he told reporters to pay close attention to the cross-examination.
“You know, wait for the cross and you will find the truth,” he said before getting into a car and driving away.
