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.
The start of her trial unfolded in a starkly different fashion than her husband’s. During Mr. Menendez’s trial, the courtroom buzzed with reporters and teams of lawyers representing Mr. Menendez and two of his co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, New Jersey businessmen who were convicted of bribing the senator.
On Monday, however, Ms. Menendez arrived at court alone. Wearing a pink surgical mask and a gray sweater with decorative fringe, she sat by herself in the courtroom for much of the morning as the judge, prosecutors and her lawyer, Barry Coburn, awaited the arrival of a late juror.
Mr. Coburn’s opening statement was brief. He urged jurors to keep in mind the claims made by prosecutors and to scrutinize the testimony presented for evidence of Ms. Menendez’s “knowledge and intent.”
He said that prosecutors had presented a “nefarious” depiction of the events and a “grossly inaccurate” portrait of Ms. Menendez’s role in the alleged scheme.
“There will be an absolute, utter failure of proof in this case with respect to knowledge and intent,” he said.
The trial is expected to last more than two months. And it took much of last week to seat a jury after many candidates said that they would be unable to serve that long. On the first day of testimony, at least one juror showed up hours late, and what began as a 12-person jury, with six alternates, was reduced to four alternates by Monday morning.
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, was the first senator to be charged with being an agent of a foreign government, and his sentence — 11 years — is the longest ever issued to a U.S. senator. Even before trial, the audacity of the conduct detailed in allegations against him upended politics in New Jersey as opponents depicted the once-powerful senator as a product of a corrupt Democratic machine.
He has been replaced in the Senate by Andy Kim, a Democrat who won the seat after making Mr. Menendez’s corruption case a centerpiece of his campaign. As part of that effort, Senator Kim sued to abolish New Jersey’s unique primary ballot design, which for decades had allowed county political leaders to give prominent placement to preferred candidates.
Mr. Menendez is appealing the jury’s verdict, and he has made overt attempts to persuade President Trump, a former political foe, that they now have a common enemy: overzealous prosecutors.
Mr. Trump, who was on trial in Manhattan at the same time as Mr. Menendez, has the power to pardon him, and the former senator has repeatedly tagged the president in social media posts. There is no indication that those entreaties have been effective.
According to the indictment, the bribery conspiracy at the heart of the case against Ms. Menendez began soon after she and the senator started dating in February 2018.
Within weeks, Ms. Menendez and her longtime friend, Mr. Hana, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Egypt, had begun setting up meetings for Mr. Menendez with Egyptian officials. The government of Egypt later awarded Mr. Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, a lucrative monopoly to certify that all meat exported to Egypt from the United States had been prepared according to Islamic law.
Mr. Menendez, 71, and Ms. Menendez, 58, married in October 2020.
And IS EG Halal continued to grow, making Mr. Hana a wealthy man. His company, according to prosecutors, was used to funnel bribes to Ms. Menendez and her husband.
During Mr. Menendez’s trial, prosecutors were barred by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause from introducing evidence directly tied to actions Mr. Menendez took as a member of Congress.
But their case against his wife is under no similar limits.
In her opening statement, Ms. Pomerantz told jurors that the bribes were linked to Mr. Menendez’s efforts to steer aid and weapons to Egypt, a country “hungry” for both.
Mr. Menendez needed an intermediary who was able to “get her hands dirty,” in ways a prominent senator could not, Ms. Pomerantz said.
That go-between, she said, was Ms. Menendez, who shuttled messages and bribes among her husband, Egyptian officials and businessmen who sought help quashing criminal cases.
“They each brought something to the table,” Ms. Pomerantz said, “that the other did not.”
