Sen. Bob Menendez arrives at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse in Manhattan on July 1, 2024. Prosecutors spent seven weeks presenting their case, and the defense team began presenting their case Monday. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
His father hid money under the false bottom of their grandfather clock. His mother stashed cash in the closet. His aunt concealed money in the television console, while other relatives packed plastic bags with bills they stored in their basem*nt — which then almost burned up when their house caught on fire.
After prosecutorsrested their caseFriday, Sen. Bob Menendez’s attorneys kicked off their defense Monday in his federal bribery trial in Manhattan, setting out to show jurors that mistrust of banks was a family tradition.
“Daddy always said: ‘Don’t trust the banks. If you trust the banks, you never know what can happen, so you must always have money at home.’ And this was something, so to speak, that they say to you and say it to you so many times that it’s — it sort of forms a law inside of you,’” the senator’s older sister Caridad Gonzalez testified.
Gonzalez, 80, was one of three witnesses the defense called Monday, offering jurors ordinary explanations for the $486,000 in cash investigators found around the senator’s Englewood Cliffs home during a June 2022 search and tens of thousands more in a bank where his wife had a safe deposit box.
Gonzalez told jurors she worked as a secretary for her brother when he practiced law before he became a full-time politician, recounting a time he asked her to retrieve cash from a box in his closet in the early 1980s. Stockpiling cash at home is “normal” among Cuban refugees like her family, she added.
“They were afraid of losing everything they worked so hard for, because, in Cuba, they took everything away from you, whether you liked it or not,” Gonzalez said.
I said, don’t make this a soap opera. You’re not only making it a soap opera, you’re making it a bad soap opera.
– Judge Sidney H. Stein to defense attorneys
Defense attorneys also called Nadine Menendez’s younger sister Katia Tabourian to the stand Monday for a similar reason — to show that the 13 gold bars, gold coins, and jewelry investigators found in the couple’s home had more to do with family than bribery.
Tabourian said their parents left the sisters gold as an inheritance, narrating evidentiary photos of jewelry the FBI had seized, saying they were family heirlooms or gifts.
She also insisted the couple’s locked bedroom closet was Nadine’s alone, and that she kept it locked after a nanny stole from her years ago.
Custody of the closet is key, because Menendez’s defense team has said he wasn’t aware of cash, gold, and other valuables his wife stored there because it was her closet and he didn’t have access to it.
Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz pushed back on the testimony of both women, reminding jurors that investigators traced much of the seized gold and cash to the couple’s codefendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, through fingerprints, DNA, and serial numbers on the gold bars. The indictment alleges that Hana and Daibes bribed the couple in exchange for his interference in foreign policy matters and domestic criminal investigations.
“To be clear, Fred Daibes isn’t a member of your family, right?” Pomerantz said. “And Wael Hana isn’t a member of your family, right?”
“No, he’s not,” Tabourian responded to both questions.
Gonzalez conceded, under Pomerantz’s cross-examination, that her family immigrated to New York in 1951, three years before Menendez was born.
Defense attorneys wanted to introduce testimony and evidence showing Nadine Menendez was struggling to escape an abusive relationship when she began dating the senator. That toxic past would show jurors that Menendez tracked his new girlfriend’s whereabouts on a phone app to ensure her safety, rather than facilitate any bribery scheme, they said.
But Judge Sidney H. Stein limited what they could introduce to avoid prejudicing jurors, calling domestic violence “too hot a topic and so tangential to the issues here.”
“I said, don’t make this a soap opera. You’re not only making it a soap opera, you’re making it a bad soap opera,” Stein told defense attorneys during an argument Monday without jurors present.
So Tabourian told jurors only that Nadine had been in “an unhealthy relationship.” Defense attorney Adam Fee also used Tabourian to suggest the couple could not have been co-conspirators during the fall of 2018, when prosecutors say their alleged bribery scheme was well underway, because they had broken up temporarily after the senator discovered she was still with her ex-boyfriend.
“I cared for her a great deal, but I can not get over her being with Doug while she was with me,” the senator texted Tabourian, who tried to persuade him to reconcile with Nadine. “Maybe time will heal wounds but not today. Wish it was different. Thanks.”
The defense also called forensic accountant Russell Richardson, who found Menendez’s bank balance rose between 2018 and June 2022 — the period prosecutors say the bribery scheme unfolded — because his salary climbed, he began collecting his pension in New Jersey, and he quit paying apartment rent when he moved in with Nadine. The implication was that the increase accounted for at least some of the cash stashed in his home.
But that gain didn’t remotely add up to the $552,000 in cash the FBI seized from the home and Nadine Menendez’s safe deposit box, Richardson conceded on cross-examination.
Richardson also acknowledged he did not look at how much cash the senator spent during that time. And he told jurors the senator typically withdrew about $400 at a time, which didn’t explain the multiple bank envelopes containing $10,000 and banded stacks of cash worth far more than $400 that investigators found jammed in jacket pockets, boots, boxes, and bags around their home.
“Did Menendez ever withdraw $10,000 in cash at once from a bank?” prosecutor Catherine Ghosh asked him.
“Not from my review of the records,” Richardson said.
Will the senator testify?
Stein gave jurors the day off Tuesday so that he could read and rule on the “tsunami of submissions” prosecutors and defense attorneys filed over the weekend as they battled over exhibits and evidence defense attorneys want to introduce.
Both sides have filed so many briefs and motions and argued so endlessly out of jurors’ presence that prosecutor Daniel Richenthal told Stein last week they’re barely sleeping, and the trial has fallen about two weeks behind schedule.
“The frenzy of the weekend has got to stop,” the judge barked at both sides before the jury entered court for the day. “It’s an abuse of the court system. We’re going to get this back on track.”
Testimony will resume Wednesday before the trial pauses again until Monday for the Fourth of July weekend. The defense is expected to rest and jurors to begin deliberations by the end of next week.
The defense team said they aim to call several more witnesses and haven’t ruled out the defendants — including Menendez — taking the stand in their own defense.
“That’s still under consideration,” Fee told Stein.
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