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New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial begins. Here’s what to know.
Washington — For the second time in his career, New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is heading to trial on corruption charges. This time, he’s fighting allegations that he traded his political influence for cash, gold bars and a new Mercedes-Benz convertible.
The allegations date back to 2018, around the time the Democratic senator began dating the woman who is now his wife, Nadine Menendez, who was also indicted in the corruption probe. Prosecutors say Menendez provided political favors to three New Jersey businessmen and secretly helped the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Menendez, who stepped down from his powerful chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after he was charged, has pleaded not guilty and hasn’t ruled out testifying.
Recent court filings revealed Menendez’s potential defense strategies, including incriminating his wife and asserting that stockpiling cash was a “coping mechanism” after “two significant traumatic events” in his life.
Menendez will be on trial with two New Jersey businessmen, who have also pleaded not guilty.
Here’s what to know.
What are Menendez and his wife charged with?
Menendez and his wife were initially charged with three criminal counts in September 2023 — conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right.
The initial indictment detailed a years-long corruption scheme in which Menendez allegedly used his influence as the then-chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee to secretly benefit Egypt; pressured a U.S. Department of Agriculture official to protect a business monopoly Egypt granted to a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hana; to interfere in a criminal investigation and prosecution by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office related to a second New Jersey businessman, Jose Uribe, and his associates; and attempted to influence a federal prosecution of a third New Jersey businessman, Fred Daibes.
A superseding indictment in October 2023 added a fourth charge alleging the couple conspired to act as a foreign agent for Egypt. Prosecutors say Menendez and his wife provided Egyptian officials, via Hana, with “highly sensitive” and nonpublic information about the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and U.S. military aid to Egypt. The senator also allegedly ghostwrote a letter on behalf of Egypt that sought to convince his Senate colleagues to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt.
“Any you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen,” Nadine Menendez allegedly texted an Egyptian intelligence official in March 2020, days before arranging one of several meetings between her husband and the official.
In January, a second superseding indictment included allegations that Menendez made favorable comments about the Qatari government as Daibes was seeking a multimillion-dollar investment from a company with ties to the government.
Menendez was indicted on a dozen new criminal charges in March in a third superseding indictment, bringing the total charges to 16. The additional charges include obstruction of justice, public official acting as a foreign agent, bribery, extortion and honest services wire fraud. Nadine Menendez, whose trial was separated from her husband’s due to a “serious medical condition,” faces 15 charges. She has also pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors allege that in exchange for the senator’s use of his power and influence to enrich the businessmen, they provided the Menendezes with lavish gifts, including cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, furniture and payments for a home mortgage as Nadine Menendez was facing foreclosure on her home.
When investigators executed a search warrant at the couple’s home in June 2022, they found over $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes and coats and 13 gold bars worth more than $100,000. They discovered nearly $80,000 in a safe deposit box at a nearby bank.
After the initial indictment, Menendez said that for 30 years he withdrew thousands of dollars each month from his personal savings account in case of emergencies. The “old-fashioned” habit, he said, had roots in his family’s experience in Cuba.
Who are the other defendants?
Hana knew Nadine Menendez years before she started dating the senator. Originally from Egypt, Hana lived in New Jersey and operated IS EG Halal, a start-up that soon became the sole company to certify halal products imported to Egypt, despite Hana having no previous experience in the halal industry.
Hana and Nadine Menendez were often the intermediaries between the senator and Egyptian officials, arranging dinners at expensive restaurants and meetings in his Senate office, according to court documents. Prosecutors say Hana put Nadine Menendez on the payroll of his company “in a low-or-no-show job” after the senator promised to use his power to facilitate foreign military sales to Egypt.
When a crash left Nadine Menendez without a car in December 2018, she turned to Hana, who connected her with Uribe, his business associate who had been implicated in an insurance fraud case. The next month, the couple and the two businessmen agreed that Menendez would intervene in the insurance fraud case, the indictments say. In return, the charges allege, Uribe helped buy Nadine Menendez a black Mercedes-Benz convertible, meeting her in a restaurant parking lot to hand over $15,000 in cash that she used for the down payment, and later arranging car payments.
Around the same time, Egypt granted a monopoly to Hana’s firm in a deal that provided a “revenue stream” for Hana to pay the Menendezes, the indictments say. But the monopoly also increased costs for other U.S. meat suppliers and after U.S. officials raised objections with Egypt, Hana requested the senator’s help to pressure the Department of Agriculture to back off.
By summer 2019, prosecutors say Nadine Menendez, who was tens of thousands of dollars behind on her mortgage and facing foreclosure, sought help again from Hana and Uribe. Hana’s company, they say, paid $23,000 to bring the mortgage payments up to date while Menendez sought to pressure New Jersey officials to end the fraud investigation linked to Uribe.
It wasn’t the first case that Menendez interfered with, according to the indictments. In late 2020, the senator met with a person who would later be nominated to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, criticizing the office’s prosecution of Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer and associate of Hana’s. Daibes was charged in 2018 with obtaining loans under false pretenses. But when the person suggested that he may have to recuse himself from the prosecution, Menendez informed him that he would recommend someone else to the White House for the U.S. attorney nomination, prosecutors alleged.
Through 2021 and 2022, after Menendez publicly praised the government of Qatar, which prosecutors suggested helped Daibes land a deal with a Qatari investor, and as the senator sought to continue to interfere in the federal prosecution of Daibes, the real estate developer allegedly gave Menendez gold bars, cash and a recliner.
“One kilo price of gold,” Menendez allegedly searched online, hours after having dinner with his wife and Daibes in May 2022.
Less than a month later, federal agents executed search warrants at the Menendezes’ home and safe deposit box.
According to prosecutors, Uribe stopped making payments on Nadine Menendez’s Mercedes after that and told her that he would say the payments were a loan if investigators asked. Menendez and his wife then allegedly sought to cover up the mortgage and car payments by writing checks to Hana and Uribe that were characterized as payments for loans, prosecutors said. That caused lawyers for Menendez and his wife to make “false and misleading statements” to investigators in 2023, the indictment said.
Uribe pleaded guilty to seven charges, including conspiracy to commit bribery, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion, and agreed to cooperate with investigators earlier this year.
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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