Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has found himself in hot water again, with prosecutors filing new charges against the embattled legislator on Tuesday, alleging that he spoke positively about Qatar in exchange for gift offerings, which may have included luxury watches worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The superseding indictment, filed in New York, included screenshots of messages Menendez made in Sept. 2021, which included a businessman sending links to watches and asking him, “How about one of these?”
The watches listed in the indictment ran as much as $23,990 apiece. Another alleged gift offering included tickets to the 2022 Formula One Grand Prix race in Miami for a relative of Menendez, where a face-value three-day hospitality ticket was as pricey as $10,000 a seat.
Those gifts were allegedly offered in connection to Menendez setting the New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes up with a Qatari investment fund.
Tuesday’s indictment alleges Menendez introduced Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family to facilitate a potential investment. While the Qatari investment fund was weighing whether it should invest in Daibes’ company or not, prosecutors say Menendez made multiple public statements supporting the Qatari government.
Also on Tuesday, a pair of longtime Republican political consultants—who backed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign—admitted to deceiving the DOJ about their lobbying activities with Qatar, Politico reported. Those men, Barry Bennett and Doug Watts, reportedly said they accepted money from the Qatari government in return for them promoting efforts to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The separate charges against the two consultants carried no explicit connections to the Menendez case—though Politico reports that the case does underscore just how much the wealthy Gulf nation “harnessed political allies in both parties.”
Menendez, who has been called on to resign by many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, was already facing charges over a corruption scandal in which he allegedly accepted gold bars from Egyptian authorities in exchange for influence over American foreign policy.
The embattled senator, who turned 70 on Monday, has pleaded not guilty to each allegation brought against him.
Tuesday’s superseding indictment also revealed that Menendez was using Google to search for the value of a kilogram of gold in the spring of 2022—the same period he’s accused of being bribed with gold bars.
Menendez’s trial is slated to begin on May 6, despite his failed efforts to have his day in court delayed.
