Government

Sen. Bob Menendez Is Quite The Overachiever

Another trophy for the shelf. And by "trophy" we mean "federal indictment."

By  
on

Menendez RFOn Tuesday, New York Rep. George Santos got a superseding indictment charging him with stealing donors’ credit card information and falsifying campaign finance reports. And New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez said, HOLD MY BEER.

In a superseding indictment filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York, prosecutors added another count to the senator’s running tally, and it’s a doozy. Menendez and his wife Nadine, along with their co-conspirator Wael Hana are charged with participating in a conspiracy for a public official to act as a foreign agent in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 219. The conflict of interest statute makes it a criminal offense for a federal official to act as an agent of a foreign government. Essentially, the law bars members of the three branches of the federal government from engaging in the kind of lobbying that would be legal for private citizens who registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Many of the allegations undergirding the new count were described in the original indictment, which charged Menendez, his wife Nadine, and three New Jersey businessmen with conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit extortion as a public official. Prosecutors accuse Menendez of relaying non-public information and taking instructions from his co-conspirators on how to wield his office to shape US foreign policy in favor of Egypt. For instance, after one dinner meeting in 2018, Hana texted an Egyptian government official, “The ban on small arms and ammunition to Egypt has been lifted. That means sales can begin. That will include sniper rifles among other articles.”

But in the new indictment, the details are even richer, with the couple pitching themselves as a full-service shop for their Egyptian handlers. Nadine, whose life motto appears to be “texts or it didn’t happen,” messaged one of her contacts in 2020, “anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen.”

And by “everything,” she meant not just having Menendez use his Senate position to make sure that money and arms flowed to Egypt. Nadine made darn sure that her hubby lobbied the executive branch, too:

A few days later she arranged for MENENDEZ to meet with Egyptian Official-3, whom NADINE MENENDEZ referred to as “the general,” regarding negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over a dam on the Nile River being built by Ethiopia, known as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (the “Dam”), which was generally regarded as one of the most important foreign policy issues for Egypt. Within one month, in or about April 2020, MENENDEZ wrote a letter to the then-Secretary of the Treasury and the then-Secretary of State regarding the Dam, beginning the letter, “I am writing to express my concern about the stalled negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over [the Dam],” and stating, “I therefore urge you to significantly increase the State Department’s engagement on negotiations surrounding the [Dam].”

The new indictment also contains some ugly new details about Menendez intervening to block recovery by American April Corley, who was maimed on vacation in Egypt in 2015 when her tour group was mistakenly attacked by the country’s military using a US-made Apache helicopter. In 2018, then Sen. Patrick Leahy placed a hold $300 million in aid to Egypt, citing the country’s human rights abuses generally and Corley’s case in particular.

Sponsored

Among other favors Menendez did for the Egyptian government was ghostwriting a letter addressed to his own Senate colleagues urging them to lift that hold. In 2019, an Egyptian official texted Hana that, if Menendez could shake loose the cash, “he will sit very comfortably.” Hana replied, “orders, consider it done.”

The details of the Corley allegation were first noted by Talking Points Memo, which contacted Leahy’s representative. The former senator was reportedly unaware that the Democrat sitting next to him at SFRC meetings was conspiring with Egypt to get around that hold.

All of this FARA-adjacent stuff is particularly awkward since at the same time Menendez was allegedly hoovering up cash and gold bars from representatives of the Egyptian government, he was urging the DOJ to prosecute former US Rep. David Rivera for failing to register as a foreign agent of the Venezuelan government.

“The American people deserve to know whether a former member of Congress was secretly doing the bidding of a dictator responsible for committing crimes against humanity in Venezuela,” he wrote in a 2022 statement highlighted by prosecutors in this new indictment as evidence that Menendez knew exactly what kind of conduct was prohibited under FARA.

All of which is NOT GREAT, BOB. And yet the Senator steadfastly insists he won’t resign from Congress, and will even seek reelection next year. But assuming he’s not a guest of the federal government by then, he may have to find a new mailing address to register for office. The DOJ just moved to seize his house in Englewood Cliffs as proceeds of a criminal offense.

Sponsored

US v. Menendez [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

, ,