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Prosecutors’ star witness faces cross-examination in Sen. Bob Menendez bribery trial
Washington — A New Jersey businessman who says he bribed Sen. Bob Menendez by buying his wife a Mercedes-Benz convertible for the purpose of disrupting two criminal investigations will continue to be cross-examined Tuesday in the Democrat’s corruption trial.
Over two days, Jose Uribe, an insurance broker who is the prosecution’s star witness, has detailed how he says he bribed the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, in order to stop criminal investigations by the New Jersey attorney general into his business associates.
Uribe is the only defendant to plead guilty in the case. The others, including the senator and his wife, have pleaded not guilty. Menendez is being tried alongside Wael Hana, the owner of a halal certification company, and Fred Daibes, a real estate developer — both are also accused of bribing the senator.
Uribe testified Monday that he asked the senator directly for his help with quashing the investigations during two meetings in August and September 2019.
The first meeting allegedly came months after he said he met Nadine Menendez in a restaurant parking lot, where he claims he handed her $15,000 in cash for the down payment on a luxury convertible. After that, he made monthly payments on the vehicle and sought to conceal his involvement in them, Uribe told jurors.
“I remember saying to her, ‘If your problem is a car, my problem is saving my family, and we went into the agreement of helping each other,'” Uribe said.
During a dinner in August 2019 with the senator and his wife, the investigations were discussed, Uribe testified. An employee who Uribe considered family was under investigation and a business associate had been charged with insurance fraud. The business associate ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.
“He would look into it,” Uribe said of Bob Menendez’s response after he asked him to “stop this investigation.” “I asked him to help me get peace for me and my family.”
The second meeting, Uribe said, happened over brandy and cigars in Nadine Menendez’s backyard on Sept. 5, 2019.
The two men were alone when Bob Menendez told Uribe he had a meeting the next day at his Newark office with the New Jersey attorney general, according to Uribe.
The senator, he said, rang a little bell sitting on the table and called for his wife using the French word for “my love.” She brought out a piece of paper and returned inside, Uribe testified. Bob Menendez asked him to write down the names of the people he was concerned about, Uribe said, recalling that the senator then folded the piece of paper and put it in his pants pocket.
Uribe said he and Bob Menendez didn’t discuss the car payments during their conversations. He assumed the senator had known about the payments and he was never told by Nadine Menendez not to keep it a secret.
The day after Bob Menendez met with New Jersey’s attorney general, Nadine Menendez asked Uribe to meet the senator at his apartment building. The senator told him there was “no indication of an investigation against my family,” Uribe testified.
Uribe said he received a call from the senator on Oct. 29, 2019, when he said Menendez told him: “That thing that you asked me about, there’s nothing there. I give you your peace.”
Nearly a year later, the two men were at dinner when Bob Menendez told him, “I saved your a** twice. Not once but twice,” Uribe testified.
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Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran’s runoff presidential election Saturday, besting hard-liner Saeed Jalili by promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country’s mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests squeezing the Islamic Republic.
Pezeshkian promised no radical changes to Iran’s Shiite theocracy in his campaign and long has held Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the final arbiter of all matters of state in the country. But even Pezeshkian’s modest aims will be challenged by an Iranian government still largely held by hard-liners, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and Western fears over Tehran enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels.
A vote count offered by authorities put Pezeshkian as the winner with 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million in Friday’s election.
Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
Supporters of Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and longtime lawmaker, entered the streets of Tehran and other cities before dawn to celebrate as his lead grew over Jalili, a hard-line former nuclear negotiator.
But Pezeshkian’s win still sees Iran at a delicate moment, with tensions high in the Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Iran’s advancing nuclear program, and a looming U.S. election that could put any chance of a detente between Tehran and Washington at risk.
The first round of voting June 28 saw the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian officials have long pointed to turnout as a sign of support for the country’s Shiite theocracy, which has been under strain after years of sanctions crushing Iran’s economy, mass demonstrations and intense crackdowns on all dissent.
Government officials up to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei predicted a higher participation rate as voting got underway, with state television airing images of modest lines at some polling centers across the country.
However, online videos purported to show some polls empty while a survey of several dozen sites in the capital, Tehran, saw light traffic amid a heavy security presence on the streets.
The election came amid heightened regional tensions. In April, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israel over the war in Gaza, while militia groups that Tehran arms in the region — such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — are engaged in the fighting and have escalated their attacks.
Iran is also enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintains a stockpile large enough to build several nuclear weapons, should it choose to do so. And while Khamenei remains the final decision-maker on matters of state, whichever man ends up winning the presidency could bend the country’s foreign policy toward either confrontation or collaboration with the West.
The campaign also repeatedly touched on what would happen if former President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, won the November election. Iran has held indirect talks with President Joe Biden’s administration, though there’s been no clear movement back toward constraining Tehran’s nuclear program for the lifting of economic sanctions.
More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 were eligible to vote, with about 18 million of them between 18 and 30. Voting was to end at 6 p.m. but was extended until midnight to boost participation.
The late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a May helicopter crash, was seen as a protégé of Khamenei and a potential successor as supreme leader.
Still, many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions that Iran conducted in 1988, and for his role in the bloody crackdowns on dissent that followed protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by police over allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
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