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US Senator Bob Menendez accepted bribes to take actions favourable to Qatar, federal prosecutors alleged on Tuesday, as they added new detail to the corruption case against the New Jersey Democrat.
The 70-year-old, who served as chair of the powerful Senate foreign relations committee, was initially indicted along with his wife and three businessmen in September, following a raid in which federal agents seized gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from his home.
He was subsequently accused of conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of the Egyptian government, one of the largest recipients of US military aid.
Tuesday’s updated indictment alleged that Menendez also agreed to help a New Jersey real estate developer, Fred Daibes, who was seeking a multimillion-dollar investment from a Qatari fund with close ties to Doha, in exchange for gold, furniture and cash. Daibes, who has also been charged, has pleaded not guilty.
Menendez introduced Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family in 2021 and attended a private event in Manhattan hosted by the Qatari government, prosecutors alleged. Soon after the event, Daibes sent Menendez pictures of luxury watches, using an encrypted app, along with the message: “how about one of these?”, prosecutors added in court filings.
Members of Menendez’s family were also given tickets to an F1 race in Miami, they alleged.
After a trip to Egypt and Qatar in October 2021, Menendez and his wife were driven home by Daibes’s driver, the prosecutors said, and upon arriving home, the senator searched the web with the query “how much is one kilo of gold worth”. A few months later, he googled “kilo of gold price”, according to the new indictment.
Menendez made a number of public statements supporting Qatar while on the foreign relations committee, calling the country’s rulers his “friends and allies” and “moral exemplars”.
He also supported a resolution favouring the gulf state, a link to which Daibes had sent to the senator using the same encrypted app.
The indictment marks the second time Menendez has defended corruption charges, after being accused in 2015 of accepting almost $1mn in bribes from a Florida ophthalmologist in exchange for allegedly intervening in Medicare billing disputes and supporting the visa applications of several of his co-defendant’s girlfriends.
A jury deadlocked and was unable to reach a verdict in that case, and the charges were dropped in 2018.
Menendez denied September’s initial allegations, accusing “forces behind the scenes” of an “active smear campaign”. He has stepped down as chair of the foreign relations committee but has resisted calls from some of his colleagues to resign from the Senate. He has not yet said whether he will stand for re-election later this year.
Adam Fee, a lawyer for Menendez, said the government’s new allegations “stink of desperation” and that prosecutors had no proof to back them up.
He added that the updated indictment made “a string of baseless assumptions and bizarre conjectures based on routine, lawful contacts between a senator and his constituents or foreign officials” and that Menendez had engaged with Egypt and Qatar in “the best interests of the United States because he is, and always has been, a patriot.”