The federal bribery and corruption case against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is now in the hands of a New York jury that will determine if the sitting senator traded his power and prestige to the highest bidder. 

Menendez, once the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on 16 counts, including bribery, honest services wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice, acting as an agent for Egypt, and conspiracy. If convicted, he could spend up to 20 years in prison.

Specifically, Menendez is accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, a convertible, furniture, and 13 gold bars in exchange for steering aid to Egypt, facilitating a halal meat monopoly, and disrupting criminal investigations on behalf of his friends and family. 

Prosecutors have shown jurors hundreds of text messages, emails, and photographs of the cash and gold bars that were found in a 2022 raid of the New Jersey home of Menendez and his wife, Nadine. They have also called dozens of witnesses in an attempt to pin the blame on Bob Menendez. 

Prosecutors spent five hours on closing arguments, while the senator’s defense lawyers stretched theirs to nearly six. Some jurors fidgeted. Others looked at the clock. One closed their eyes. 

Bob Menendez, though, appeared happy with his defense team, telling reporters, “We have stripped away the government’s false narratives and exposed their lies.”

The senator has been on trial for the past eight weeks alongside Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer charged with bribing Bob Menendez and his wife with gold bars and cash, and Wael Hana, a New Jersey man who owns a halal meat certification company. 

All have pleaded not guilty. Nadine Menendez’s trial was delayed due to medical reasons. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni didn’t mince words during closing arguments. 

“Menendez was in charge,” he said. 

The senator’s lawyer, Adam Fee, spent two days trying to convince jurors that the government failed to connect the dots linking his client to bribery and corruption claims.  

“When you acquit Sen. Menendez, the United States wins,” Fee told jurors Wednesday. 

Despite thousands of exhibits entered into evidence, as well as dozens of witnesses who took the stand, no one admitted to actually seeing Bob Menendez take money or gifts as bribes. Instead, many testified that Nadine Menendez had brokered the deals. 

“Assumption, speculation, fantasy, conjecture,” Fee said. “They will call it inference. It’s not. You are being asked to imagine, in the gaps of evidence, the criminal stuff.”

Fee also said the actions that Bob Menendez took, such as calling government officials about investigations involving constituents or secretly ghostwriting a letter for Egypt that lobbied lawmakers to release military aid, were all part of his job. Everything the senator did was above board, he said.

“This case, it dies here today,” he said. “They have failed to prove that very high standard that Bob’s actions were anything other than what we want our elected officials to do.”

He later said, “[Menendez’s] actions were lawful, normal, and good for his constituents and this country.”

Part of the defense’s strategy has been to portray Nadine Menendez as a power-hungry woman who made side deals without the knowledge of her husband, something prosecutors strongly pushed back on.

Monteleoni said Bob Menendez would have had to be blind and deaf not to know what was happening in his own home.

During a rebuttal argument on Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal mocked an attempt from Bob Menendez’s lawyer to suggest that $95,000 in cash found in a plastic bag inches away from a rack of the senator’s jackets belonged to his wife, calling the claim “truly unbelievable.”

Cash was found stuffed in some of the jackets.

Prosecutors also called the allegations against Bob Menendez, once the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “a classic case of corruption on a massive scale.”

During closing arguments, Monteleoni reminded jurors of testimony by Jose Uribe, the prosecution’s star witness. Uribe, a former insurance broker who has already pleaded guilty in the case, testified that he agreed to buy Nadine Menendez a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s help in making an insurance fraud investigation of a friend go away. 

Uribe told jurors he asked Bob Menendez to do “anything in his power” to stop the inquiry into a woman he considered to be like a daughter and that the senator said he would “look into it.”

“I asked him to help me get peace for me and my family,” Uribe said, adding that it was the fifth time he had met the senator but the first time he had brought up asking him for help.

Uribe said he never discussed the thousands of dollars he made in car payments for a convertible for Nadine Menendez.

He added that he assumed the senator knew he was financially helping his wife because she had been trying to set up a meeting between them so Uribe could ask him to block the state investigation.

“The only reason why she’s trying is I’m complying with my part of the deal,” Uribe said.

He added that he told Nadine Menendez, “If your problem is a car, my problem is saving my family,” before giving her $15,000 in cash to make a down payment. 

Fee said the senator had no knowledge of the agreement between his wife and Uribe and described Uribe as a liar who took advantage of the Menendezes. 

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Monteleoni pushed back and said Bob Menendez, who called his wife to his side by ringing a tiny silver bell placed on the patio table, was in control.

“He’s not a puppet having his strings pulled by someone that he summons with a bell,” he said.