NEW YORK (AP) — Prosecutors at the bribery trial of Sen. Bob Menendez rested their case on Friday after presenting evidence for seven weeks, enabling lawyers for the Democrat and two New Jersey businessmen to begin calling their own witnesses next week to support their claims that no crimes were committed and no bribes were paid.
On
their final day of direct questioning, prosecutors elicited details about the
senator’s financial records by questioning an FBI forensic accountant. Judge
Sidney H. Stein then dismissed jurors for the weekend. Defense attorneys are scheduled
to begin presenting their case on Monday in Manhattan federal court.
Later
Friday, Stein rejected requests by lawyers for all three defendants that he
acquit their clients on grounds that prosecutors had failed to provide
sufficient evidence to the jury for it to deliver a verdict. The requests are a
routine feature of trials after prosecutors rest.
Prosecutors
say gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in a raid of
Menendez’s home two years ago were bribes paid by three businessmen from 2018
to 2022 in return for favors that the senator, using his political power,
carried out on their behalf.
Defense
lawyers claim the gold belonged to his wife and that Menendez had a habit of
storing cash at home after his family lost almost everything in Cuba before
they moved to New York, where Menendez was born.
“The
government hasn’t proven its case,” the senator remarked as he left the
courthouse Friday afternoon.
Menendez,
70, is on trial with two of the businessmen after a third pleaded guilty in a
cooperation deal with the government and testified at the trial. Menendez’s
wife, Nadine Menendez, is also charged in the case, which was unveiled last
fall. Her trial has been postponed while she recovers from breast cancer
surgery. All defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Menendez’s
lawyers are planning to spend up to three days presenting testimony from
several witnesses to support their argument that Nadine Menendez, who was
Nadine Arslanian when she began dating the senator in early 2018, kept him in
the dark about her financial troubles. The couple married in the fall of 2020.
The
defense also plans to introduce testimony to try to show that Arslanian was in
close contact with the senator at the height of the alleged conspiracy in late
2018 and early 2019 because she was being harassed by an ex-boyfriend.
Stein
said Thursday that defense lawyers can elicit testimony to counter evidence
introduced by prosecutors that might otherwise be interpreted to suggest that
Arslanian and the senator seemed to be closely following each other’s
whereabouts because they were involved in the alleged conspiracy.
But
he said he wouldn’t allow the jury to hear testimony that she underwent
treatment at a hospital because of an abusive relationship with an ex-boyfriend.
He said Friday that a witness also cannot testify about specific acts of
stalking or abuse.
“This is not going to be ‘Days of Our Lives’ or some soap
opera,” the judge warned lawyers Thursday.
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