MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York federal judge on Friday denied former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s Hail Mary motion to vacate his bribery and corruption convictions. The onetime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee awaits a sentencing scheduled for Jan. 29.
In a 78-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein declined to overturn Menendez’s criminal convictions on various grounds, including that the jury was mistakenly shown improper evidence that implied the sitting Senator accepted bribes in exchange for promises to perform official acts.
“In sum, the government offered sufficient evidence — none of which violated the speech or debate clause — to conclude that this meeting was part and parcel of Menendez’ s corrupt bargain,” the Clinton-appointed senior judge wrote.
“Menendez’s assertions that evidence introduced at trial violated his rights under the Speech or Debate Clause must fail both on their merits and because Menendez has provided no reason for the court to disturb its prior rulings,” he reiterated later in the opinion.
The 70-year-old senator was convicted in July on criminal charges that he accepted bribes of cash and gold in exchange for agreeing to flex his legislative muscle to interfere in a trio of state and federal criminal investigations to protect the businessmen.
Prosecutors said he helped one bribe-paying friend get a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund and protected another from regulatory scrutiny over a lucrative monopoly contract to handle religious halal certification for meat exports to Egypt.
Last month federal prosecutors alerted the defense and Judge Stein that they had inadvertently uploaded nine documents to a laptop jurors could consult during deliberations that had fewer redactions than Stein had ordered.
During trial, prosecutors wanted to include document evidence they said would prove their accusation that Menendez, while a sitting U.S. senator, accepted bribes in exchange for unfreezing aid and arms to Egypt.
But his defense attorneys successfully argued that because portions of the documents referenced legislative acts Menendez took, they could not be submitted as evidence inferring bribery without violating the U.S. Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal action over their legislative actions.
Stein ultimately allowed the prosecutors to include redacted portions of those documents, but they told the judge last month they discovered that when they loaded a laptop with evidence for the jury to review during deliberations, they did not include all the redactions.
Menendez’s defense lawyers argued this inclusion was grounds for acquittal.
“The government walked all over the senator’s constitutionally protected speech or debate privilege in an effort to show that he took some official action, when in reality, the evidence showed that he never used the authority of his office to do anything in exchange for a bribe,” his lawyers wrote. “Despite a 10-week trial, the government offered no actual evidence of an agreement, just speculation masked as inference.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York insisted the accidental inclusion of the unredacted document do not violate the speech or debate clause and should have no effect on the Democrat’s conviction.
Stein found that despite the error in redactions, prosecutors’ presentation to the jury of that evidence was entirely proper.
“The speech or debate clause does not prohibit the government from introducing evidence of a promise or a request that a member of Congress take a legislative act in the future,” he wrote. “Indeed, as this court has repeatedly held, the clause’s protection ‘extends only to an act that has already been performed.’”
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Bob Menendez’s defense attorneys insisted during trial that his wife, Nadine Menendez — who began dating the senator in 2018 and married him two years later — kept him in the dark about her financial troubles and the assistance she requested from the co-defendant businessmen.
The senator resigned in August, one month after the convictions. He had already been forced to give up his post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was he was initially charged in the case in fall 2023.
Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor for Southern District of New York, which prosecuted the Menendez corruption case, announced last month that he will be stepping down to make way for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for that post, former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Jay Clayton.
The gold bar bribery scandal was Menendez’s second set of corruption charges in a decade.
He was indicted in 2015 in a similar scheme involving accusations of peddling political influence to help Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen in exchange for luxury vacations in the Caribbean and Paris, flights on the eye doctor’s private jet and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to organizations that supported the senator.
A hung jury ended that trial two years later.