MANHATTAN (CN) —Lawyers for New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez criticized federal prosecutors on Tuesday for failing to meet the burden of proof required to convict the Democrat on bribery charges at the denouement of his two-month criminal trial.
“The absence of evidence should be held against the prosecution,” Menendez’s lawyer Adam Fee told jurors during his closing summation. “They are exploiting the gaps in the case they have presented to you and filling them with incriminating inferences.”
The 70-year-old Latino politician was initially charged in a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York that accused him and his wife of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes — including “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value” — in a yearslong exchange for his political influence, starting in 2018.
At trial, prosecutors said Menendez and his wife took bribe payments from a trio of New Jersey businessmen for acts that included interference with multiple state and federal investigations, unfreezing U.S. military aid to Egypt, acting as unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the government of Qatar, and pressuring the Department of Agriculture to lay off an ally’s lucrative monopoly on certification of halal meat exports.
During his three-hour closing summation, Fee described the senator’s actions as “lawful, normal, and good for his constituents and his country.”
An FBI search of Nadine Menendez’s home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in 2022 uncovered and led to the seizure of over $100,000 of solid gold bars and about $480,000 in cash.
Fee, a former assistant U.S. attorney with the Southern District of New York, told jurors that federal prosecutors have focused on the large sums of cash and gold because “it’s provocative, it’s atypical.”
Calling the photographs of the gold bars and stacks of cash entered into evidence “cherry-picked nonsense,” Fee said the prosecution wanted jurors to envision a caricature of the senator swimming in cash and gold, “just like Scrooge McDuck.”
Fee insisted the cash stashed around the home was innocently explained by Menendez’s habit of storing cash at home due to his upbringing by Cuban immigrants who fled the country as the communist regime seized personal property.
The gold bars, Fee said, were gifts from Nadine’s friends and family from countries like Lebanon, Armenia, and Egypt, where gifts of jewelry and gold are more commonplace than in the United States.
Fee chastised prosecutors for prompting jurors to draw inferences about Menendez’s guilt based on dense spreadsheets and summary charts of phone and email communications, while later in his closing arguments making his own conclusions about the cash and gold found in Nadine’s home from the limited concrete evidence available.
“You would infer this is Nadine’s money,” Fee told jurors.
Regardless of the defense’s explanations for this cash and gold, Fee insisted prosecutors failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the cash and gold were the in fact items received through bribery.
“The evidence doesn’t supply confidence about that conclusion,” he said.
Prosecutors showed jurors Menendez’s Google search history, which they said illustrated that the senator’s online queries for the value of kilogram bars of gold — “for the first time in his life” — coincided with meetings with co-defendant, Fred Daibes, a Garden State real estate tycoon with ties to Egypt and Qatar who prosecutors claim gave Menendez more than $250,000 worth of gold bars.
Fee countered that those Google searches for the fluctuating prices of gold bars are not evidence of any bribery scheme. “Bob is searching for gold on a lot of occasions when the government is not alleging he is receiving bribes,” he said.
Menendez’s attorney also proposed an alternate theory regarding the Google searches: that Nadine was using his phone or asking him to do searches, directing jurors to make inferences from other prior Google searches from the senator’s phone that included “Blow dry bars in DC,” “How to do you say girlfriend in Spanish,” and “How do you say tomato in Spanish.”
Prosecutors delivered closing arguments for five hours across two days, finishing up before lunch Tuesday.
Menendez’s defense lawyers are expected to continue their summation for up to two more hours on Wednesday morning, before attorneys for co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes make their respective final pitches to jurors.
Prosecutors will get to deliver one final rebuttal statement before the jury receives the case for deliberations, as early as Thursday.