Defense for Bob Menendez rests without New Jersey senator testifying

NEW YORK — Senator’s defense Bob Menendez The New Jersey Democrat rested Wednesday without testifying at his bribery trial in New York.

Menendez’s lawyers called multiple witnesses over two days in an attempt to overturn seven weeks of testimony and hundreds of exhibits and communications from federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars gold and cash from 2018 to 2022 in exchange for using his influence in the Senate to grant favors to three New Jersey businessmen.

Two of the businessmen — Fred Daibes and Wael Hana — are on trial with him. A third, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty to the charges and testified against the trio at trial.

Daibes and Hana also pleaded not guilty and were given the opportunity to present a defense, although Judge Sidney H. Stein told jurors that the burden of proof was on the prosecution and that a defense was not necessary. Attorneys for Daibes rested at the same time as Menendez without presenting a defense. Attorneys for Hana were left to present their case.

Prosecutors spent seven weeks presenting their case before resting last Friday, presenting evidence to show that Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, often acted as a go-between, connecting the senator and the businessmen.

Nadine Menendez, 57, who began dating the senator in 2018, has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges, but her trial has been postponed as she recovers from breast cancer surgery.

Attorneys for Bob Menendez have argued that his wife hid her financial troubles from him, including an inability to make mortgage payments on her Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, along with many of her business dealings with the businessman. They have also said she inherited gold that was found in her bedroom during an FBI raid on their home in 2022.

An FBI agent testified earlier at the trial that he ordered the seizure of more than $486,000 in cash and more than $100,000 in gold bars in the raid because he suspected a crime had occurred.

Among the witnesses called by Menendez’s lawyers was his 80-year-old sister, Caridad Gonzalez, who told the jury that her relatives regularly stashed large sums of money in their homes after Menendez’s parents fled Cuba in 1951 with only the money they had hidden in the secret compartment of a grandfather clock.

“It’s normal. It’s a Cuban thing,” she said.

Bob Menendez was born after the family arrived in Manhattan.

Menendez has pleaded not guilty to bribery, fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. After the charges were announced in September, he was forced to resign from his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He has resisted calls to resign from the Senate and a month ago filed papers to run again as an independent.

Prosecutors allege that Daibes provided gold bars and cash to Menendez and his wife to enlist the senator’s help in a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund, causing Menendez to act in a way that benefited the Qatari government.

They also say Menendez did things to benefit Egyptian officials in exchange for bribes from Hana, as the businessman made a valuable deal with the Egyptian government to certify that imported meat met Islamic dietary requirements.

An earlier corruption prosecution of Menendez on unrelated charges ended with a jury that does not give a definitive answer from 2017.