The FBI 'ransacked' my house and broke down doors, Menendez says

The first search of Senator Robert Menendez's home took place on Thursday morning in June 2022, while the US Senate was in session.

It was one of five searches of Mr. Menendez's property and electronic devices that judges approved between January 2022 and September 2023 during a federal investigation into the senator, a New Jersey Democrat who was then chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Relations, according to a new legal filing.

Information and items collected during the searches later played a major role in a September indictment in which federal prosecutors accused Mr. Menendez of accepting cash, gold and a luxury car in exchange for political favors.

But late Monday, Mr. Menendez's lawyers argued that much of what was seized during what they called “exploratory sniffing” should be thrown out. The arrest warrants, they said, were issued by magistrate judges duped by prosecutors who “actively distorted the evidence.”

During the search on June 16, 2022, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents “ransacked” the home, Mr. Menendez's lawyers wrote. The legal brief does not specify whether it was Menendez's home in New Jersey or Washington that was raided, but the indictment indicated that a split-level home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where Mr. Menendez lives with his wife, Nadine Menendez, was searched. that day.

Neither Mr. Menendez nor his wife were at home, he said in a court statement. Records show the Senate was in session that day, but it was unclear whether Mr. Menendez was in Washington.

Upon returning home, Mr. Menendez wrote, he discovered that investigators had searched file cabinets, desk drawers, dressers, wardrobes and closets, leaving their contents lying haphazardly about.

“I was shocked to find my belongings and furniture in complete disarray,” he said.

Officers have even broken open unlocked doors, he added.

Agents seized 13 bars of gold bullion, a luxury Mercedes-Benz and more than $550,000 in cash — including tens of thousands of dollars in envelopes, one of which contained the fingerprints of Mr. Menendez and a co-defendant accused of delivering bribes . according to the indictment.

That night, prosecutors obtained another warrant to conduct a search.

“The government took active action to obtain several of these search warrants the evidence and withheld material exculpatory information, misleading well-intentioned magistrate judges into issuing arrest warrants that should never have been issued,” Mr. Menendez’s attorneys wrote.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment Tuesday.

The senator, his wife and three businessmen have been charged in an elaborate, years-long bribery conspiracy. All five have pleaded not guilty, and over the past two weeks their lawyers have filed a slew of legal motions ahead of a trial set to start in May.

The grand jury investigation is not over, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said in a letter to the judge on Monday.

“Although the grand jury has returned indictments in this case, the investigation remains ongoing,” prosecutors wrote in the letter, which came in response to a request from The New York Times and Inner City Press, a legal news website, to make certain information public, shielded from the public.

The senator's lawyers took no position on whether the redacted material, much of which appeared to portray Mr. Menendez in a more favorable light, should be made public.

Their filing on Monday also took direct aim at the government's motives.

The senator's lawyers presented the investigation as a reward for the Justice Department's failure to prove previous corruption allegations against Mr. Menendez, who was indicted in New Jersey in 2015 on unrelated bribery charges. In that case, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict and prosecutors declined to pursue the case after a judge dismissed the most serious charges.

“The Administration's apparent zeal to 'get back at' Senator Menendez for defeating the earlier prosecution has overwhelmed its common sense,” his lawyers wrote.