Menendez lashed out on the Senate floor. Now he’s fighting back in court.
Lawyers for Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat accused of accepting cash and gold bribes, asked a judge on Wednesday to dismiss the charges. They said overzealous prosecutors were criminalizing normal legislative activities and flouting constitutional protections for members of Congress.
The arguments, contained in the first legal brief filed by Mr. Menendez’s defense team, provided an early glimpse of his legal strategy four months before he was set to stand trial in Manhattan on federal corruption charges.
The assignment came a day after Mr. Menendez, 70, stood on the Senate floor to offer a highly unusual rebuttal to the allegations laid out in three consecutive indictments. Prosecutors have accused him of acting as an unregistered agent of Egypt, taking bribes to help Qatar’s government, exchanging political favors for bricks of gold and trying to halt criminal investigations to kill allies in New Jersey to help – all points raised by his lawyers in the letter. Archive of 42 pages.
“The government’s allegations in this case — that he sold out his office and even sold out his country — are outrageously false and even distort reality,” Mr. Menendez’s lawyers wrote. “Every official action the Senator took represented his good faith policy decisions.”
The timing of the filing does not appear to have been a coincidence. Legal motions were not due until Jan. 15, and attorneys broke months of silence a day after the senator defiantly responded to the accusations in Washington marked a shift in both strategy and tone.
In a statement, Adam Fee, a lawyer for Mr. Menendez, said the senator should not even be allowed to appear in court.
“The Administration should be forced to end this case,” Mr. Fee said, “and its unilateral attempt to falsely tarnish the reputation that Senator Menendez has built through fifty years of patriotic public service. ”
In arguing that the judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court, should dismiss the charges, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers relied on two legal principles.
They cited a 2016 Supreme Court decision that overturned the conviction of Bob McDonnell, a former Republican governor of Virginia, claiming that many of the senator’s actions were not “official acts” and therefore not illegal; the McDonnell ruling made it more difficult to prosecute public officials by limiting the types of quid pro quo actions that could be defined as corruption.
Other conduct, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers said, was protected because of legislative independence embedded in the Constitution.speech or debate clause.”
The attorneys also accused the government of delaying public disclosure of crucial discovery materials, concealing “important exculpatory evidence from the public and the court,” and using evidence to present a “distorted reality.”
They said prosecutors relied on “produced for tabloid images of cash and gold bars” rather than “factual evidence of a bribery scheme” to craft a story based on “speculation, cherry-picking and innuendo.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan will have the opportunity to respond to the defense’s arguments when prosecutors file their legal briefs in the case, which are due by Feb. 5.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, declined to comment on the new filing.
Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were first indicted in September on charges that they accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including bars of gold bullion, in exchange for the senator’s willingness to increase his political influence at home and abroad to apply. Investigators seized 13 gold bars, $566,000 in cash and a 2019 Mercedes-Benz during searches of Mr. Menendez’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., home and a safe in June 2022. Three New Jersey businessmen were also indicted on bribery charges.
Prosecutors said the car was given to Ms. Menendez as part of the plan to replace a vehicle that police records show she was driving when she struck and killed a pedestrian, Richard Koop, 49, in Bogota, N.J.
Then in mid-October, prosecutors added a new charge: that Mr. Menendez conspired to act as an agent of Egypt while still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A third indictment, unsealed last week, accused him of using his political influence to benefit the Qatari government.
All five defendants, each represented by separate lawyers, have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In Tuesday’s Senate speech, Mr. Menendez accused prosecutors of abusing the grand jury process by rolling out new charges and details in subsequent indictments, a strategy he said was intended to taint the jury pool.
“I am innocent,” Mr. Menendez said in his speech, “and I intend to prove my innocence.”