Unpacking the Menendez Indictment

Happy Tuesday! It’s officially the end of an era: Netflix’s original DVD rental operation will close up shop on Friday after 25 years. 

If you still have a little disc in a red sleeve collecting dust on top of the DVD player you haven’t used in a decade—you might as well just leave it there. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• More than 6,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region in Azerbaijan, to Armenia over the weekend after last week’s Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement moved the enclave more firmly under Azerbaijani control. Armenian government officials—historically backed by Moscow—warned of ethnic cleansing of the roughly 12,000 ethnic Armenians who lived in the formerly semi-autonomous region. Meanwhile, at least 200 people were injured near the unofficial capital of the region when a fuel depot exploded. The cause of that explosion is still unknown.  
• The Biden administration announced Monday the U.S. had established diplomatic relations with two Pacific island nations, the Cook Islands and Niue, as part of an effort to strengthen ties in the region as China looks to gain influence throughout the Pacific. The diplomatic recognition came just before President Joe Biden welcomed leaders from Pacific island countries to the White House for a two-day summit focused on climate change and U.S. infrastructure investment on the islands. 
• The Commerce Department on Monday added 28 companies from China, Russia, Pakistan, and other countries to their export blacklist, which bars U.S. companies from selling to those groups unless they’ve received a license from the U.S. government. Nine of the additions were allegedly part of a scheme to violate existing export controls and sell drone parts to a previously blacklisted company tied to the Russian security services. 
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will debate each other live on Fox News on November 30 in Georgia, the network announced Monday. The debate will be the culmination of more than a year of back-and-forth between the two governors—one running for the Republican presidential nomination, the other a prominent surrogate for President Joe Biden—from opposite sides of the country. 

Hard Cash, Gold Bars, and a Mercedes

Tucked away between a plastic ice bin and a red cardboard box featuring the Pillsbury dough boy—with his arms theatrically extended in his trademark “ta-da” pose, proudly presenting not one but two frozen pie crusts—were stacks of $100 bills, bound by rubber bands and wrapped in aluminum foil, that would become important evidence in the federal investigation of an elaborate bribery scheme concocted by former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. The banknotes, some $90,000 in cash of the cold, hard variety, were found in the freezer of Jefferson’s home in Washington by federal law enforcement officials who had watched him accept the money a day earlier as a bribe meant to facilitate business in Africa. Jefferson would be convicted in 2009 of taking more than $400,000 in bribes as part of his get-rich scheme.  

While there are no reports of hidden cash in the freezer, last week’s 39-page indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez, the senior Democratic senator from New Jersey, detailed a wide variety of bribes Menendez allegedly accepted to benefit friends and the government of Egypt. There was money funneled through a consulting company. Mortgage payments. More than $500,000 in cash—some of which was found stuffed in Menendez’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus jacket. A sinecure for his wife. A brand new Mercedes-Benz C300 convertible. More than $100,000 in gold bars. And two exercise machines, plus an air purifier. (All that’s missing is a DVD player.) 

Menendez has denied the allegations and refused to resign despite a growing number of Democrats calling for him to step down. The senator has said he will fight the charges—and his seat is up for election next fall.

The indictment details a brazen scheme with bribes that would make a mob boss blush. Menendez, his wife Nadine, and three New Jersey businessmen—Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes—were all named as participating in the venture between 2018 and 2022. The couple “accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from Hana, Uribe, and Daibes in exchange for Menendez’s agreement to use his official position to protect and enrich them and to benefit the government of Egypt,” the Justice Department said in a release.  

Menendez served as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair—he has temporarily stepped down since the indictment was released—and prosecutors allege he used that perch to benefit the Egyptian government in exchange for bribes paid out by Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman with ties to Egyptian government officials. Nadine Menendez is a longtime friend of Hana’s, and she connected him with Menendez shortly after she began dating the senator in 2018. Nadine and Hana arranged and attended meetings with Menendez and Egyptian military and intelligence officials, allegedly laying the groundwork for the bribery scheme. Prosecutors say Menendez took a number of actions to benefit Egypt, including ghost-writing a letter for an Egyptian official that would be shared with his Senate colleagues, pushing for the release of a $300 million hold on aid to the country. 

The line of communication ran from the senator to Nadine, who would in turn share information, like the letter, with Hana who would then finally share it with Egyptian officials. Menendez allegedly informed Egyptian officials on multiple occasions that he was going to approve or remove holds on U.S. military aid to the country, and he instructed Nadine to make sure Hana knew he was key to the aid going through. Nadine sometimes communicated directly with Egyptian officials. “Anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen,” she texted one official in 2020.

Hana also benefited directly from the arrangement. Menendez allegedly pressured a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, at Hana’s request, not to contest a business monopoly granted to the businessman by the Egyptian government. Hana’s company—IS EG Halal—held a monopoly on certifying U.S. food imports to Egypt as halal despite the company not having previous experience with the certification. The indictment says the agriculture official did not succumb to Menendez’s pressure, but IS EG Halal still kept its status, resulting in increased revenue, part of which Hana used to pay Nadine. Menendez also allegedly tried to use his influence to pressure state and federal prosecutors to drop or be more lenient in criminal cases involving Hana’s business associates—Daibes and Uribe—in exchange for bribes from the two men.

Menendez has denied all of the charges and called the prosecution a smear campaign. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said in a statement on Friday. “I am not going anywhere.” The senator made his first public appearance following the indictment yesterday with a partial response to the specific bribery charges. “For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba,” he said at a press conference. “This may seem old-fashioned, but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years. I look forward to addressing other issues at trial.” Menendez did not offer a rebuttal of the other bribery charges or take questions from reporters. 

The senator is certainly entitled to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Nonetheless, the evidence detailed in the indictment—including extensive records of emails and texts between the defendants—paints a compelling case. The cash found by investigators had the fingerprints and DNA of Daibes, and the unique serial numbers on some of the gold bars trace back to Hana. 

This isn’t Menendez’s first brush with the law. He was indicted in 2015 over bribery charges related to his dealings with his friend Salomon Melgen, a wealthy ophthalmologist. The indictment alleged that Menendez used his office to benefit one of Melgen’s businesses and tried to intervene in a Medicare fraudulent billing investigation into Melgen. In return, Melgen provided Menendez with campaign contributions, luxury vacations, and private jet travel. The case ended in a mistrial with a hung jury, and Menendez was eventually acquitted. Significantly, his trial defense didn’t deny the actions he had taken to benefit Melgen, but rather argued they were acts of friendship, not responses to bribes. Melgen was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison in a separate case concerning health care fraud—President Trump commuted Melgen’s sentence in January 2021 as one of his final acts in office.  

A host of House Democrats and New Jersey party leaders are now clamoring for Menendez’s resignation. Seven out of the nine members of the New Jersey Democratic congressional delegation have said the senator should step down. Of the remaining two, one expressed concern over the charges while the other—Menendez’s son—backed the senator. Democratic Rep. Andy Kim announced he would challenge Menendez in a primary contest next year. Gov. Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, offered a particularly harsh condemnation. “The alleged facts are so serious that they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state,” he said. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, also a Democrat, has thus far remained silent.

National Democratic leaders have been slower to call for Menendez’s ouster. “Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday. “He has a right to due process and a fair trial.” President Biden has not yet weighed in on the indictment, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre signaled White House approval of Menendez stepping down from his leadership of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Sens. John Fetterman, Sherrod Brown, and Peter Welch are the only three Democrats in the upper chamber currently saying Menendez should resign. Last night, Rep. Nancy Pelosi said that Menendez’s continued presence would distract from Democratic efforts to defeat Republicans next year. “It would probably be a good idea if he did resign,” she told MSNBC.

Pelosi has a point. It will be more difficult for Democrats to argue Donald Trump’s four indictments and 91 felony charges are disqualifying for office while Menendez remains in the Senate and potentially runs for reelection. “We cannot have someone who’s under criminal indictment sitting in the White House or in the United States Senate,” said Richard Painter, the White House chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “We have to have some standards in this country, and that at least is a minimum standard.” 

“If @TheJusticeDept had a frequent flyer club, Donald Trump would have Diamond status, with Bob Menendez at least a Platinum member,” Painter wrote on Sunday. 

Menendez and the other four defendants are expected to appear in federal court in New York on Wednesday morning. 

Worth Your Time 

• America’s distinctive regional accents are disappearing, and that’s a sad thing for the country, Jack Butler writes in National Review. “Regional accents and dialects are some of the strongest aspects of the federalist culture that exists alongside, and in part because of, America’s federalist politics,” he argues. “Ours is—and ought to be—a vast and variegated country, not some homogenous blob. Its residents are part of the nation, obviously, but are also proud of their particularities. Our diffuse system of government suits that well. The increasing movement of power and wealth, not just to Washington, but also to certain regional hubs (Atlanta being an excellent example)—and away from areas of differentiation—has weakened this motley character. … So what can we do? Here, the concerned conservative finds himself in a familiar place: raging against trends that seem inevitable. The best recourse is to hold dearly to one’s upbringing, especially if living in or nearby one’s place of birth. But also, if one has settled elsewhere, be firmly rooted there. Respect its folkways, its mannerisms, and, of course, its dialect. Bring your own cultural priors to it, but humbly. Don’t be a cultural imperialist or centralizer, insisting that everyone speak and act as you do. Accept, embrace, and come to love the varieties of American experience. And stay strong, y’all—er, you guys.”
• What’s the No. 1 rule of friendship? “Presence,” David French writes for the New York Times. “I’ve never met a person who wants to lose friends. But I’ve met many, many people who suffer from loneliness and say that they just ‘lost touch.’ What happened? I ask. ‘Life happened,’ they say. During the early pandemic, when Zoom calls were a brand-new thing to many of us, I received an unusual invitation from a reader, who wrote that he and his old college friends all read me and would I mind joining one of their weekly Zooms? It sounded fun, so I said yes. When I joined I was struck by the obvious joy of their friendship—the inside jokes, the easy camaraderie. They were much younger than me, in their 30s, and before we signed off, they asked if I had any last thoughts. … After I got off the call, I kicked myself for not remembering a quote by C.S. Lewis: ‘Friendship is unnecessary,’ he wrote, ‘like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.’ … Compared with the competing demands of family and work, in any given moment friendship can feel unnecessary. But as the years roll on, and countless justifiable individual absences wear down our relationships, there will come a time when we will feel their loss. But it need not be that way, especially when our simplest and highest command is merely being there.”

Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Trump Breaks with McCarthy, Pushing Republicans to Shut Down the Government 

Also Presented Without Comment

The Hill: [Democratic Minnesota] Rep. [Dean] Phillips Says He Hasn’t Ruled out Biden Challenge in 2024 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew check in on Iowa evangelicals, Kevin unpacks (🔒) why comedians lie about their hard knocks and what it says about America, and Nick worries (🔒) Americans are numb to Trump’s ever-growing illiberalism at our own peril. 
• On the podcasts: The David and David era of Advisory Opinions closes with a wide-ranging First Amendment discussion. 
• On the site today: Chris writes that America, in search of a classless society, has become a society that has no class, and Anthony Ruggiero and Ivana Stradner explain how Russia is using propaganda to push back on the U.S. sending depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine.  

Let Us Know

Should elected officials always step down after a criminal indictment or wait till the case is resolved?