Sen. Bob Menendez’s Trial Is Set to Begin, With a Sprawling Web of Charges

Jury selection for Senator Robert Menendez’s corruption trial started on Monday in a federal courthouse in Manhattan, a 20-mile drive from Mr. Menendez’s home in northern New Jersey, where for decades he has been a well-known Democratic political leader.

His efforts to move the trial to his home turf failed. Jurors picked to decide the case will be from Manhattan, the Bronx or one of several New York counties north of the city.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York have said that they expect to take as many as six weeks to present their case against Mr. Menendez, who is accused of being at the center of an international bribery scheme involving more than $100,000 in gold bullion, an Egyptian halal meat monopoly and a Qatari sheikh.

Mr. Menendez, 70, will be tried with two New Jersey businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana.

All three sat in the court for more than two hours Monday morning, quietly talking with their lawyers while the judge, Sidney H. Stein, questioned prospective jurors who said they would be unable to serve for the duration of the trial.

The senator appeared relaxed, his hands clasped either at his waist or near his chest, fingers tented.

His wife, Nadine Menendez, 57, was also charged in the bribery scheme but will be tried separately, in July. A judge granted her request for a delay after her lawyers said she had a serious medical condition that required prompt treatment and, possibly, a lengthy recovery.

All four defendants have pleaded not guilty, and Mr. Menendez has said he will be exonerated at trial, leaving open the possibility that he might run for re-election as an independent in November.

His lawyers have indicated that his defense, at least in part, will be to blame Ms. Menendez, his wife of less than four years. If he chooses to testify, Mr. Menendez would be most likely to outline “the ways in which she withheld information” and “led him to believe that nothing unlawful was taking place,” his lawyers said in court papers.

A key government witness in the trial could be Jose Uribe, another businessman who was charged with Mr. Menendez but who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. At his guilty plea in March, Mr. Uribe admitted that he gave Ms. Menendez a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible “in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation.”

The case has proceeded relatively quickly to trial ever since the senator and his wife were first charged in September 2023 with conspiring to trade Mr. Menendez’s “influence and power” for an array of bribes, including the luxury car, home mortgage payments, gold bullion and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Here are the central claims outlined by prosecutors, who will be trying to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Menendez, Mr. Daibes and Mr. Hana participated in a sprawling bribery conspiracy that lasted nearly five years:

Aiding Egypt

Mr. Menendez is charged with using his “influence and power” as a senator in ways that benefited both the government of Egypt and Mr. Hana, an American citizen who emigrated from Egypt and was trying to get a halal meat certification company off the ground in New Jersey.

For example, after meeting with Mr. Hana in May 2018, prosecutors say, Mr. Menendez obtained nonpublic information from the State Department about the number and nationality of employees at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The information was relayed to an Egyptian official through Ms. Menendez and Mr. Hana. Prosecutors noted that the information was not classified but was considered highly sensitive and could pose “significant operational security concerns” if disclosed.

Mr. Menendez, a former leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also accused of steering weapons and aid to Egypt in exchange for bribes. In May 2018, he secretly helped to write and edit a letter from Egyptian officials who were lobbying other U.S. senators to release $300 million in additional aid, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors also described an effort by Mr. Hana to enlist Mr. Menendez’s help in smoothing over a U.S.-Egyptian dispute during this period. After an American tourist was seriously injured in a mistaken 2015 Egyptian military attack, some members of Congress balked at awarding certain military aid to Egypt, according to the indictment.

In May 2019, prosecutors said an Egyptian official sent a message to Mr. Hana, in Arabic, saying that if Mr. Menendez helped to resolve the matter, “he will sit very comfortably.”

“Orders, consider it done,” Mr. Hana replied, according to the indictment.

A year later, after a meeting with an Egyptian general, Mr. Menendez also urged the State Department to take a more active role in a dispute over a hydroelectric dam Ethiopia was building on the Nile River, prosecutors said. Egypt was opposed to the dam and feared it would cut into the country’s water supply.

Halal meat monopoly

To help Mr. Hana’s business, IS EG Halal, Mr. Menendez pressured a high-level Department of Agriculture official, prosecutors claim. The official had objected to Egypt’s plan to make Mr. Hana’s company the sole entity authorized to certify that meat imported to the country from the United States had been prepared according to Islamic law. (Until then, at least four U.S. companies had divided the work, and the sudden shift caused prices to skyrocket.)

According to the indictment, Mr. Menendez called the official to demand that the U.S.D.A. “stop interfering with IS EG Halal’s monopoly.”

The official refused, but the business arrangement, which the United States had no power to block, remained in place, enabling IS EG Halal to thrive. The company became a conduit for “the bribes being paid” to Mr. Menendez through his wife, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors have said that all of this justified a highly unusual criminal charge: that Mr. Menendez acted as a foreign agent, and that his wife and their co-defendants conspired to put him into that role.

‘Kill and stop all investigation’

Mr. Menendez is also charged with trying to use his clout to quash criminal cases in New Jersey — two involving associates of Mr. Uribe and one against Mr. Daibes, a real estate developer and longtime friend of the senator who had donated to his campaigns.

Mr. Uribe had been implicated in an insurance fraud investigation by the New Jersey attorney general’s office that involved two of his associates, according to the indictment. “The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Mr. Uribe wrote to Mr. Hana in April 2018.

Mr. Menendez called and then met in September 2019 with officials from the attorney general’s office in an effort to scuttle the inquiry, according to the indictment. In exchange, Mr. Uribe told a judge at his recent guilty plea, he had provided the Mercedes-Benz to Ms. Menendez in April 2019 and arranged to cover its monthly payments.

Mr. Uribe also admitted in court that he and Ms. Menendez attempted to cover up the scheme by trying to make it appear that the car payments were loans, not bribes. A few days after Mr. Uribe’s guilty plea, Ms. Menendez and the senator were additionally charged with obstruction of justice.

Seeking a new U.S. attorney

Mr. Daibes is accused of giving Mr. Menendez and his wife bribes of furniture, gold bars and cash.

Investigators found 11 gold bars linked to Mr. Daibes during a June 16, 2022, search of the couple’s home. Mr. Daibes’s fingerprints or DNA were also found on 10 envelopes, containing more than $80,000, during the search, according to a court filing.

Less than three months before the search, Ms. Menendez sold two one-kilogram bars of gold that were traced to Mr. Daibes and worth about $120,000, prosecutors have also said.

The payments were provided, in part, in exchange for the senator’s efforts to resolve federal bank fraud charges that Mr. Daibes faces in New Jersey, according to the indictment.

Mr. Daibes was charged in October 2018 with obtaining loans under false pretenses from a bank he had founded years earlier, Mariner’s.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Menendez tried to have a U.S. attorney for New Jersey installed who might be willing to go easy on Mr. Daibes. That effort failed, but Mr. Menendez twice called the federal prosecutor responsible for overseeing Mr. Daibes’s case, according to the indictment.

Mr. Daibes eventually pleaded guilty to one of the 2018 indictment’s 14 felony counts in an agreement that required no prison time.

Last year, however, after Mr. Daibes was charged in the senator’s corruption case, a federal judge in New Jersey rejected the plea, which he then withdrew. The bank fraud charges are still pending.

Qatar connection

All of this was occurring as Mr. Daibes was preparing to build a high-rise apartment complex along the Hudson River in Edgewater, N.J.

A Chinese company that had been bankrolling the project had pulled out because of delays tied to an environmental cleanup of the parcel, a Superfund site. Interest rates among conventional lenders were climbing, and Mr. Daibes was now accused of bank fraud.

It was Mr. Menendez who helped craft a solution by introducing Mr. Daibes in June 2021 to an investor who was a member of the Qatari royal family, according to the indictment.

Then, as Mr. Daibes was negotiating with the would-be investor, Mr. Menendez issued at least one statement, on Aug. 20, 2021, supportive of Qatar, prosecutors said. (A news release the senator issued that day praised “friends and allies in Qatar” as “moral exemplars” for accepting Afghan refugees.)

Mr. Menendez’s comments came at a time when the oil-rich Gulf state was working to repair its image before hosting the 2022 World Cup.

In January 2023, Heritage Advisors, a firm founded by a Qatari sheikh, finalized a $45 million shared ownership agreement for the Edgewater project with a company controlled by Mr. Daibes, New Jersey property records show.

Mr. Daibes gave Mr. Menendez “at least one gold bar” after a draft of the real estate deal was firmed up, prosecutors said.

Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have said the allegations related to Qatar are baseless.

In a legal filing, they have argued that prosecutors ignored statements by the investment company’s chief operating officer that indicated the partnership had nothing to do with the senator’s support.

An official with the Qatari investment firm told prosecutors in December 2023 that the company considered the high-rise complex a “trophy project” because it faced the Manhattan skyline. The investors also said that they were able to negotiate favorable terms because Mr. Daibes was “unbankable,” leaving him few lending options, according to a filing last month by Avi Weitzman, one of Mr. Menendez’s lawyers.

“The decision to invest in the Edgewater development project,” Mr. Weitzman wrote, “had nothing to do with Senator Menendez or the government of Qatar.”