Democratic senator wants inquiry on Egypt influence-peddling after Menendez indictment

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said on Tuesday that he hopes an inquiry is launched into Egypt’s behavior toward the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the wake of Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) bribery charges involving the country.

Federal prosecutors have accused Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, of illegally using the senator’s position as the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee to peddle influence with donors and benefit the Egyptian government in exchange for cash, gold bars, and other valuables. The senator, who is required to relinquish his SFRC chairmanship while under indictment, has dismissed the charges as part of a larger “smear campaign” against him and vowed to fight them.

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Menendez was defiant at a Monday press conference, predicting he would be exonerated and accusing prosecutors of framing the allegations against him to appear “as salacious as possible.”

Murphy, the top senator on the SFRC’s Middle East subcommittee, told reporters at the Capitol that he believed Congress should consider placing a hold on the Biden administration’s $235 million military aid request for Cairo, “pending an inquiry into what Egypt was doing.”

“It’s a devastating series of allegations,” Murphy said. “And as a committee, we now have a responsibility to understand what Egypt was doing and what Egypt thought it was getting. There are serious implications for U.S. policy towards Egypt if, as the indictment suggests, they were trying to use illicit means to curry favor on the committee.”

While he did not say whether the House or Senate should conduct such an investigation, the Connecticut Democrat said: “I would hope that our committee would consider using any ability it has to put a pause on those dollars, pending an inquiry into what Egypt was doing. I have not talked to colleagues about this yet, but obviously, this raises pretty serious questions about Egypt’s conduct.”

The U.S. has a complicated relationship with Egypt. The country has a checkered reputation on human rights, though the U.S. works closely with Cairo on shared counterterrorism and geopolitical goals.

The Biden administration announced that it had approved the $235 million waiver earlier this month, which would release the previously withheld funds. Supporters of the move argued that it benefits U.S. national security interests, while opponents argue that Cairo’s lack of meaningful progress on human rights cannot be ignored.

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Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), a co-founder of the congressional Egypt Human Rights Caucus, said in a statement on the Menendez indictment that he was urging the administration “and my colleagues in Congress to note and respond forcefully to the covert Egyptian campaign to thwart American foreign policy aims detailed in the indictment.”

Going further in an interview later Tuesday, Beyer alleged that Egypt “is conducting an espionage operation within the U.S. Senate. … I think that calls for a much stronger response from the Biden administration, and the straightforward one is to withhold [military aid].”