But a lawyer for Ms. Menendez, the wife of former Senator Robert Menendez, told jurors at the start of her bribery trial that she lacked “knowledge and intent.”
But a lawyer for Ms. Menendez, the wife of former Senator Robert Menendez, told jurors at the start of her bribery trial that she lacked “knowledge and intent.”
But a lawyer for Ms. Menendez, the wife of former Senator Robert Menendez, told jurors at the start of her bribery trial that she lacked “knowledge and intent.”
Nadine Menendez, the wife of New Jersey’s disgraced former senator, Robert Menendez, played a central role in a yearslong plot to trade her husband’s political influence for bribes of cash, gold and a luxury car, a prosecutor told jurors on Monday at the start of Ms. Menendez’s federal bribery trial.
“They were partners in crime,” the prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, said of Ms. Menendez and her husband, who at the time led the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Partners in corruption.”
Ms. Pomerantz, a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, laid out the extensive array of charges Ms. Menendez is facing simply and bluntly in an opening statement.
“They were on the take,” she said, adding, “They put a price on the senator’s power and then sold it.”
Mr. Menendez and his wife were charged together in 2023 with taking bribes of gold bars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s efforts to steer aid to Egypt and to scuttle criminal cases that threatened his allies in New Jersey.
After a lengthy trial in Manhattan, he was convicted of taking bribes and acting as an agent of a foreign government and is expected to begin serving an 11-year prison sentence in June. Ms. Menendez’s trial was delayed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer; she underwent a mastectomy and completed reconstructive surgery less than two weeks ago, according to her lawyer and her husband.