Democrats Tell Guilty Gold Bar Bob Menendez: Quit Senate Now

The verdict on Sen. Bob Menendez’s Sopranos-worthy bribery trial is finally in, and the Manhattan court prosecutors are getting the last laugh.

After two months of comedic testimony, a New York City jury on Tuesday found Menendez guilty on all counts of bribery charges after prosecutors alleged he and his wife, Nadine, accepted almost $150,000 in gold bars, a luxury car, and hundreds of dollars in cash from three New Jersey businessmen aiming to influence Menendez through his position as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The businessmen and Menendez’s co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, had a years-long agreement whereby Menendez would put his thumb on American policy-making on behalf of the Egyptian and Qatari governments, prosecutors said. The third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified against his former partners. Menendez, meanwhile, blamed his wife, whose trial will take place separately in part due to a recent breast cancer diagnosis.

Dems Call on Menendez to Step Down

Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, fellow New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy all called on Menendez to bow out of Congress in the immediate aftermath of the verdict going public.

“In America, everyone—no matter how powerful—is accountable to our laws,” Murphy wrote on X. He added that he’d be willing to appoint a new senator if Menendez heeds the calls to step down.

There’s no love lost between the party and the embattled senior senator from New Jersey. Menendez has been trying to outrun his bribery accusations for years, and he already filed to run as an independent in June.

If he’s on the ballot in November, his independent bid might pull enough Democratic votes to hand Republicans a New Jersey senate seat for the first time since 1972.

New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim, the Democrat running for senator who has long called on Menendez to step down, jumped into the melee on X as well, calling Tuesday a “sad and somber day” for our country.

“Our public servants should work for the people, and today we saw the people judge Senator Menendez as guilty and unfit to serve,” he wrote. “The people of New Jersey deserve better.”

The judge who oversaw the trial, Sidney Stein, will sentence Menendez and his co-defendants on Oct. 29. Menendez can fight to stay in Congress, but the governing body could vote to expel him instead.

The circus-style saga was the senior New Jersey senator’s second indictment in a decade, and he never took to the stand to testify in his own defense. These were some of the trial’s most bizarre moments.

Menendez’s Attorneys Tried to Weed Out Anyone Who Hates Jersey

Defense attorneys proposed asking the potential jury members from New York if they had an anti-New Jersey bias, and if they thought Jerseyites were more likely to commit crimes.

“You motherfuckers,” comedian Jon Stewart later joked on The Daily Show. “You bury one union leader in a football stadium whilst running a human organ trafficking ring through some Secaucus rabbis and suddenly your whole state is a suspect?!”

Menendez Apparently Likes to Summon His Wife With a Little Bell

Uribe, the accomplice-turned-witness, testified that over cigars and cognac during a business meeting in 2019, Menendez summoned his then-girlfriend out onto the porch using a “little bell.” Uribe said that the senator then asked his “mon amour” Nadine to fetch him a piece of paper to take note of the companies that Uribe needed Menendez to protect from criminal investigations. Uribe said he later texted Menendez’s co-defendant, Wael Hana, that the Victorian-era experience was “super weird.”

Menendez’s Attorneys Claim His Wife Stuffed His Congressional Suit Jacket With Cash

After the jury saw multiple photographs of jackets, boots, and bags stuffed with almost $500,000 in cash, Menendez’s defense attorneys insisted that his wife had planted the $95,000 in cash found in a plastic bag inches away from a rack of the senator’s jackets. Some of the cash prosecutors found was stuffed in the senator’s embroidered congressional jacket.

The Senator Is Really Serious About His Meat Consumption

Part of the trial included an investigation into how Menendez pressured the Department of Agriculture to help Hana maintain his lucrative monopoly on halal meats imported into the United States. Simultaneously, while the trials’ legal fees were stacking up, the senator used over $7,000 in campaign funds at the swanky chain Morton’s Steakhouse in D.C., even as his re-election effort pulled in anemic fundraising numbers.

It’s a ‘Cuban Thing.’ You Wouldn’t Understand.

Menendez’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez, testified about the piles of cash found around Menendez’s house, echoing a strange defense her brother floated before the trial. She said her family always kept some cash stored away in case of emergencies after her family fled Cuba, trying her best to explain why her brother, who was born in New York, had almost half a million dollars strewn around his house. She insisted that the practice is a “Cuban thing” and that her “daddy always said, ‘Don’t trust the banks.’”

Google Had The Smoking Gun That The Prosecutors Needed

After returning home from a business trip in Egypt, Menendez looked up “how much is one kilo of gold worth,” allowing prosecutors to connect the senator to the gold bar bribes.