NEW YORK — On Election Day 2018, Bob Menendez won a third term in the Senate after his political career was dented a year earlier by the opening of his first corruption case.
That trial ended in a juryless jury, and federal prosecutors threw out the case, so voters in blue New Jersey decided to send him back to the Senate. But the day wasn’t all happy.
In a text message shown to the jury at his final trial on Monday, Menendez expressed his emotions about the split from Nadine Arslanian.
“I cared for her very much,” he said in a message to Nadine’s sister, “but I can’t get over her [another man] while she was with me.”
Menendez eventually married Nadine two years later. But his heartfelt Election Night text message to his wife’s sister two years earlier was to suggest they were not together during a time prosecutors say they conspired.
Menendez’s lawyers called Nadine’s sister, his own sister, and a forensic accountant to testify, in order to show that they were taking a break from part of the conspiracy. They also wanted to show that it would not be unusual for Menendez and Nadine to have their own money and gold in their homes.
The senator’s defense team is attempting to refute prosecutors’ allegations that the couple conspired to sell his office for gold bars and wads of cash from early 2018 through 2022.
But prosecutors have poked holes in the testimony of defense witnesses that could have seriously damaged the senator’s defense.
Prosecutors specifically emphasized that the forensic accountant, who Menendez’s team has been trying to get to testify for weeks, falsified the data Menendez’s legal team presented to the jury.
Likewise, they undermined a key point made by the senator’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez. She testified that she could ask her brother to help friends who needed it. That was supposed to suggest that Menendez was calling on behalf of his constituents. But prosecutors produced text messages that suggest his own sister didn’t get the VIP treatment that prosecutors say the men who bribed the senator received.
When his sister’s neighbor needed help with an immigration matter, Menendez advised her to contact the staff at his office.
Prosecutors said the men accused of bribing the senator discussed their problems with the New Jersey attorney general, the New Jersey attorney general’s office or a senior Trump administration official.
Russell Richardson, a forensic accountant at the consulting firm Guidepost Solutions, reviewed years of financial records that appeared to confirm the senator was routinely withdrawing hundreds of dollars in cash each month. Indeed, bank records show Menendez regularly withdrew $400 in cash every few weeks, a total of more than $150,000 since he entered the Senate.
The senator has said he is hiding money to avoid government seizure because of the trauma his family endured in Cuba. Records do not show whether that money was the same cash found in shopping bags, boots and coats during an FBI search of his home in the summer of 2022.
Furthermore, prosecutors stressed that some of the accountant’s figures were completely fabricated.
Richardson presented a chart showing that Menendez could have withdrawn similar amounts during his previous time in the U.S. House of Representatives. But those numbers were based on assumptions, not actual bank records. They were, in his words, “extrapolated” from the senator’s behavior in the Senate. But that required pulling numbers out of thin air to create a chart to show jurors.
The testimony also failed to explain $10,000 worth of cash found during a search of Menendez’s home, as Richardson said he had never seen Menendez withdraw that much money at once. Some of the cash envelopes found in Menendez’s home bore the fingerprints of one of the senator’s two co-defendants, Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer. His attorney has said he did give the Menendezs gifts of cash and gold, but Menendez’s legal team has not acknowledged that the senator received them.
Prosecutors have seen witnesses stumble in the stands during the trial, now in its eighth week. Their first witness, an FBI agent who led the search of Menendez’s home, was forced to recant his testimony about where he found one of the senator’s blazers during his search.
Still, the accountant’s cross-examination stood out as particularly brutal, since Menendez plans to call only five witnesses. The senator himself could also testify, though that seems highly unlikely. Menendez is, of course, presumed innocent, so the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove their case, but a key part of his defense is that it’s plausible that the stacks of cash found in his home were rightfully his.
For that reason, Gonzalez, his sister, testified that at one point in the 1980s she knew her brother had kept money in a boot chest in his house. It was “normal,” she said, because “he’s Cuban” and their family had fled the country. Although that exodus predated Castro and Menendez himself was born in Manhattan, she said her father had told the family not to trust banks and that “it’s a law in you.”
The other part of Menendez’s defense is that his wife, Nadine, acted behind his back.
For that reason, his lawyers called her sister, Katia Tabourian, to discuss their split.
She also talked about her own family’s heirlooms, which at one point contained several kilos of gold.
But it was unclear to her how much family gold her sister owned, apart from some coins and jewellery that are not at issue in the case.
Defense attorneys had more success in showing that a closet where the FBI found much of the money and gold was a room Nadine primarily used and kept locked. The FBI agent who had to recant his jacket testimony had to do so because he said he found the senator’s jacket in that closet — when the jacket was clearly hanging on a nearby door.
Menendez’s attorney, Adam Fee, also attempted to refute testimony that the senator once summoned Nadine to a conspiracy meeting by ringing a bell.
He asked Tabourian if she had ever seen her brother-in-law calling her sister with a bell.
“I’ve never seen a bell,” Tabourian said.
Jurors were given the day off Tuesday due to ongoing discussions between prosecutors and Menendez’s defense team about what other evidence Menendez can show the jury in the coming days.
Menendez’s team wants to provide evidence that Nadine was abused by her ex-boyfriend.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein, who is overseeing the case, warned the Menendez team last week that he did not want to turn the trial into a soap opera and that he was frustrated by a “tsunami” of legal documents over the weekend about what to show the jury.
“You’re not just making a soap opera out of it, you’re making a bad soap opera out of it,” Stein told Menendez’s defense attorneys on Monday.
