Nadine Menendez wants separate trials for herself and her husband
Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were both indicted last fall in a wide-ranging federal corruption case in which they were accused of accepting cash and gold bribes.
Now their marriage is at the center of a new dispute in the case, according to legal documents filed late Monday.
Mrs. Menendez is asking a Manhattan judge to separate her case from her husband's. In her request, she said she understood that Senator Menendez may wish to testify at his trial, “and that his testimony may include disclosure of confidential marital communications with Ms. Menendez that Senator Menendez considers essential and material to his defense.”
Mrs. Menendez wants to maintain the confidentiality of her communications with her husband, her lawyers wrote to Federal District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein.
If they were tried together, the lawyers said, “the court would be faced with an irreconcilable conflict between husband and wife regarding the admissibility of confidential marital communications.”
The unusual request comes after Mr. Menendez took the floor in the Senate a week ago to offer an aggressive rebuttal to the charges against him. He, his wife and a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hana, have all been charged with participating in a conspiracy to exchange political favors for gold bars; to act as an unregistered agent of Egypt; taking bribes to help the Qatari government; and to attempt to block criminal investigations into allies in New Jersey.
“I am innocent,” Mr. Menendez said on the Senate floor, “and I intend to prove my innocence.”
His lawyers filed a letter the next day, Jan. 10, asking that Mr. Menendez's charges be dismissed on the grounds that overzealous prosecutors criminalized normal legislative activity and violated constitutional protections for members of Congress.
Mr. Menendez could file additional legal paperwork Monday evening, the deadline for defense motions in the case. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York will have the opportunity to respond to the defense's arguments when it files its legal papers, which are due by Feb. 5.
Nicholas V. Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, declined to comment Monday.
The Menendezes and Mr. Hana have all pleaded not guilty. That includes two other New Jersey businessmen who are also charged.
Ms. Menendez's attorneys argued that allowing the couple to be tried separately would allow the senator to “fully exercise his constitutional right to testify in his own defense, without subjecting Ms. Menendez to unfair prejudice.” ”
Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said: 'The background to all this is that prosecutors and courts hate to try the same case twice. They will look for ways to protect the rights of both defendants in one trial.”
In most cases, Professor Gillers says, that can be done through an instruction to the jury that it will consider certain testimony only regarding, for example, the senator, and not against Ms. Menendez.
“The jury takes an oath to respect these restrictive instructions,” he added.
The senator married Ms. Menendez, his second wife, in 2020 after a whirlwind romance. Prosecutors say she plays a central role in the bribery conspiracy. They laid out the charges in three consecutive indictments, the most recent of which was issued this month.
They met years ago and began dating shortly after the conclusion of an earlier federal corruption trial against Mr. Menendez, which took place in New Jersey and ended in a hung jury in 2017. Federal prosecutors there declined to retry the senator after a judge senator had thrown out the most serious charges.
Mr. and Mrs. Menendez still live in the split-level home in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, where she raised her two adult children. It was in that home and in a safe rented by Ms. Menendez that investigators found more than $550,000 in cash, 13 gold bars and a new Mercedes-Benz that prosecutors say had been given to Ms. Menendez as a bribe.