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Prosecutors say top Democrat accepted cash, gold bars and other bribes in exchange for using his political influence.
Top United States Senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of all 16 criminal counts he faced in a widely watched bribery trial in New York, including corruption and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
A Manhattan federal court jury delivered its verdict on Tuesday after deliberating for more than 12 hours over three days.
Prosecutors had accused Menendez, a New Jersey lawmaker and an influential figure in the Democratic Party, of taking part in overlapping bribery schemes in which he and his wife accepted bribes from three businessmen who wanted Menendez’s help.
In exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and car and mortgage payments, Menendez helped steer billions of dollars in US aid to Egypt, where one of the businessmen, Wael Hana, had ties to government officials, according to prosecutors.
Menendez also was accused of seeking to influence criminal probes involving two other businessmen, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe.
Hana and Daibes were co-defendants in the US senator’s trial and were also convicted on each of the counts they faced. Uribe pleaded guilty and testified as a prosecution witness against Menendez.
Menendez – who also pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included bribery, acting as a foreign agent and obstructing justice – did not testify during the trial.
But he had insisted publicly he was only doing his job as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reporting from outside the court in New York on Tuesday afternoon after the verdict was delivered, Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey said Menendez’s lawyers also tried to paint the senator’s wife as the culprit during the trial.
“But the prosecution laid out a very detailed case over those nine weeks showing that Menendez not only was involved in this, but knew what was going on,” Saloomey said.
His conviction on Tuesday comes four months before November’s US election and potentially dooms any hope Menendez had of campaigning for re-election as an independent candidate.
Menendez’s wife, Nadine, also was charged, although her trial has been postponed while she recovers from breast cancer surgery.
In a 2022 raid on the New Jersey home where Menendez lived with his wife, FBI agents confiscated gold bars worth nearly $150,000 and more than $480,000 in cash, some of it stuffed into boots and jackets emblazoned with the senator’s name.
Menendez had expressed some hope as he left the court on Monday that the jury was carefully reviewing the evidence in its deliberations.
“It’s obvious that the government’s case is not as simple as they made it to be,” Menendez said before repeating himself. “It’s not as simple as they made it to be. The jury’s finding that out.”
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