Defense blames Menendez’s wife as bribery trial starts
NEW YORK — A lawyer for Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., on Wednesday laid blame for the bribery charges the senator faces squarely on his wife — a woman he found “dazzling” but who, his lawyer said, hid her past dire finances and the source of her newfound income from her powerful husband.
She had kept him in the dark about “what she was asking others to give her,” the lawyer, Avi Weitzman, told a jury in opening statements at the start of the senator’s federal corruption trial in Manhattan.
The gold and some of the cash that the FBI found in a search of the senator’s New Jersey home — items that prosecutors say were bribes — were kept in a locked closet where his wife, Nadine Menendez, stored her clothing, Weitzman said.
“He did not know of the gold bars that existed in that closet,” Weitzman added, describing Bob Menendez as an American patriot and “lifelong public servant” who “took no bribes.”
Prosecutors have charged Menendez, 70, and his wife with accepting gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including cash, gold, home furnishings and a Mercedes, in exchange for political favors for friends at home and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
It is Menendez’s second bribery trial. The first ended in a hung jury in 2017 in New Jersey.
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