Day: May 13, 2024

Sen. Robert Menendez goes on trial Monday for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including bars of gold, in exchange for using his position as a powerful member of Congress to benefit three New Jersey businessmen as well as the governments of Egypt and Qatar.

Menendez, a three-term Democratic senator from New Jersey, faces 16 criminal counts, including bribery, obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent and honest services wire fraud. He has pleaded not guilty, and says that he is being targeted because he is a prominent Latino.

He faces trial alongside two co-defendants, Egyptian-American businessman Wael Hana and real estate developer Fred Daibes, while a third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government. Menendez’s wife, Nadine, was also charged but will face trial separately.

After he was indicted, Menendez stepped down from his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a powerful post that gave him influence over foreign military sales and financing. Despite calls to step down entirely, he has professed his innocence, refused to resign from the U.S. Senate and is still running for re-election this fall — though not as a Democrat.

This is not the first time Menendez has faced legal peril. He was indicted in 2015 on unrelated federal corruption and bribery charges, which he fought and took to trial. That case was declared a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict.

Menendez has vowed he will prevail in this prosecution as well. This case will be heard by a federal jury in Manhattan, unlike his previous trial which was in his home state of New Jersey. Jury selection begins Monday, and the trial is expected to last up to two months.

The prosecution’s case

The indictment describes a complex bribery scheme that allegedly ran from 2018 to 2023. Prosecutors say that Menendez and his wife accepted bribes from the three businessmen, including gold bullion, a Mercedes Benz convertible and cash. In exchange, Menendez allegedly agreed to take action to protect and enrich the trio, as well as to secretly benefit Egypt and Qatar.

The alleged scheme contains various threads that were all intertwined.

One revolved around Hana, who prosecutors say had close contacts with Egyptian officials and had been friends with Nadine Menendez for years.

The indictment says Menendez promised to use his power and authority to facilitate military sales and financing to Egypt. In return, Hana promised, among other things, to put Nadine Menendez on the payroll of his company for a “low-or-no-show job.”

Prosecutors say Menendez provided sensitive U.S. government information to Egyptian officials, with Hana acting as a middleman of sorts. Menendez also allegedly edited and ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of Egypt aimed at convincing U.S. senators to lift a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt. He also signed off on foreign military aid to the country.

Hana, meanwhile, had secured a monopoly from the Egyptian government on certifying U.S. food exported to Egypt as halal. That monopoly, prosecutors say, was highly lucrative for Hana and his business, but it raised the cost of halal certification for U.S. meat suppliers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture contacted the Egyptian government with concerns about the monopoly.

Gold bars

According to the indictment, Menendez—at Hana’s request—intervened to protect Hana’s business by calling a senior U.S. Department of Agriculture official and demanding the department “stop interfering” with Hana’s monopoly.

The thread related to Qatar revolves around another co-defendant, Fred Daibes.

According to the indictment, Daibes was trying to secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a Qatari investment company, and he enlisted Menendez’s help to do so.

Prosecutors say Menendez made “multiple public statements supporting the Government of Qatar,” and then gave them to Daibes to show the Qatari investor and a Qatari government official. In return for allegedly using his influence as a senator to help Daibes, the indictment says Menendez received gold bars and cash from the businessman.

FBI agents recovered gold bars, as well as $480,000 in cash, during a court-authorized search of Menendez’s home in New Jersey. Some of the gold bars bore serial numbers indicating they’d previously been owned by Daibes.

The indictment says stacks of cash were found in jackets with Menendez’s name stitched on them. Some envelopes of cash found at the home had Daibes’ fingerprints on them, according to court papers.

In addition to those actions, prosecutors allege Menendez also used his influence as a senator to intervene in investigations or prosecutions at the state and federal level.

In one instance, they say he tried to intervene in a New Jersey state criminal prosecution of an associate of one of the businessmen, Jose Uribe, by calling a senior investigator and urging that the matter be resolved.

In another instance, Menendez allegedly took action to intervene in a federal prosecution of Daibes.

Menendez’s defense

Menendez has said that he has worked tirelessly over his career as a public servant, and he’s claimed that he’d being targeted because of his Cuban heritage.

In a news conference after his indictment, Menendez told reporters that “prosecutors get it wrong sometimes.”

On the cash found at his home, Menendez said that he has withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from his personal savings for potential emergencies. It’s a habit, he said, drawn on “the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Menendez was born in New York to parents who had immigrated from Cuba.

“I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be New Jersey’s senior senator.”

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has replaced his defense minister and a long-time close ally Sergei Shoigu with an economist, a major reshuffle of military leadership more than two years after Moscow’s grinding war against Ukraine has sent defense spending soaring.

Andrey Belousov, a civilian who served as former first deputy prime minister and specializes in economics, was appointed to the top defense post, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday.

Peskov tried to downplay the move, but the reshuffle comes amid speculation about infighting at the highest echelons of power. Just last month, one of Shoigu’s long-time protégés at the defense ministry was arrested and charged with corruption.

Shoigu was “relieved” of his position by presidential decree, Peskov said, but he will remain an influential part of Putin’s administration as secretary of Russia’s Security Council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev, a former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), who would “transfer to another job.”

Shoigu will also become the deputy in Russia’s Military-Industrial Commission, Peskov said, as Putin embarks on a fifth term as president.

The timing of Shoigu’s exit is notable, coming off the back of several significant advances by Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.

Russia has launched its most serious cross-border ground assault since Ukraine recaptured the northern Kharkiv region in the late summer of 2022. There have been several months of increased Russian air attacks on the city of Kharkiv amid a grinding advance in Donetsk in the east that has seen incremental but significant progress.

Shoigu had helmed the country’s defense ministry for 12 years and led the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian troops initially caught Kyiv by surprise but were soon beaten back, exposing the weaknesses of Moscow’s corruption-riddled military and its willingness to send waves of poorly trained and equipped soldiers into what Ukraine and Russian troops have both dubbed a “meat grinder.”

His critics have frequently described Shoigu as remote and out-of-touch with the realities of the conflict. His most forceful critic was the late Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin who accused the Defense Ministry of starving his fighters of resources and bureaucratic incompetence before launching an unsuccessful mutiny last year and dying weeks later in a plane crash.

Despite the criticism, Shoigu has remained a popular politician in Russia. Having spent two decades as the minister of emergency situations, he cultivated an image of a helpful official who brings help when it’s needed.

He is also a rare outsider in Putin’s original inner circle, which consists mostly of the president’s allies from his St. Petersburg political beginnings and his former KGB colleagues. Shoigu was born and grew up in the remote Siberian republic of Tuva and got into politics through his association with the former president Boris Yeltsin.

Belousov’s appointment suggests Russia’s strategy will continue to focus on outgunning Ukraine.

Belousov was selected by Putin because of a need for “innovation,” Peskov said in a press call, during which he highlighted the ministry’s rising budget, saying it was approaching levels last seen during the Cold War.

“Today on the battlefield, the winner is the one who is more open to innovation,” Peskov said. “Therefore, it is natural that at the current stage, the president decided that the Russian Ministry of Defense should be headed by a civilian.”

In a reference to the war in Ukraine, Peskov said that due to “well-known geopolitical circumstances, we are gradually approaching the situation of the mid-80s when the share of expenses for the security bloc in the economy was 7.4%. It’s not critical, but it’s extremely important,” Peskov said.

The budget currently amounts to 6.7% of GDP, he said.

Peskov highlighted Belousov’s previous leadership experience and economic background.

“This is not just a civilian, but a person who very successfully headed the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia, for a long time he was aide to the president on economic issues, and was also the first deputy chairman of the government in the previous cabinet of ministers,” Peskov said.

Much has been made of Belousov’s civilian status, even though Shoigu himself has limited hands-on experience with the military. He holds a rank of a general as a result of his official roles and has never served in active service.

Peskov added that the new appointment did not signal a shift in Russia’s current military system.

“As for the military component, this appointment will in no way change the current coordinate systems. The military component has always been the prerogative of the Chief of the General Staff [Valery Gerasimov], and he will continue his activities. No changes are currently envisaged in this regard,” he said.

In his new role, Shoigu will oversee Russia’s military industrial complex, Peskov said.

“He is deeply immersed in this work, he knows very well the pace of production of military-industrial products at specific enterprises and often visits these enterprises,” he said.

The news follows the arrest last month of one of Shoigu’s close allies, deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov, who was charged with taking a bribe in what was the country’s highest-profile corruption scandal since Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

Ivanov has been accused of accepting a bribe of 1 million rubles (at least $10,800), according to Russian state media TASS.

Former US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told CNN in an interview Sunday that Putin’s reshuffle is an “important” and “interesting move.”

“The bigger argument coming out of Moscow right now is that Russia is moving toward a war economy,” he said. “They’re on a war footing.”

Esper said that “one of the disappointing things about Shoigu’s tenure is we thought the Russian army, at least during my time at the Pentagon, we thought they were professionalizing, that they were modernizing all their equipment, their doctrine, how they train and fight, and we really haven’t seen that on the battlefield.”