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In late January 2018, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was acquitted on 18 federal charges centered on corruption and bribery. At about the same time, prosecutors say he began a new cycle of alleged criminality, one culminating in his arrest last month for similar alleged acts.
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On Thursday, those charges became more complex. The government released a superseding indictment that expanded the allegations against Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, who he started dating soon after his 2018 acquittal. The new charges include ones alleging that Menendez, his wife and an Egyptian-born man named Wael Hana had conspired for a public official — the senator — to act as a foreign agent, in this case on behalf of the Egyptian government.
To hammer home the point that Menendez should have known better than to (allegedly) take actions on behalf of that foreign nation, the indictment points to letters written in 2020 and 2022 in which Menendez demanded that another elected official be investigated under the Foreign Agent Registration Act for his work for the government of Venezuela.
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The letters written while prosecutors say Menendez was engaged in similar behavior.
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Menendez’s alleged actions on behalf of Egypt began with his new relationship. Nadine Menendez (then Nadine Arslanian) was friends with Hana before she began dating the senator. Soon after the relationship began, the indictment alleges, Hana and Nadine Menendez set up meetings between the senator — the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations — and Egyptian officials to discuss foreign and military aid. Hana allegedly then provided Nadine Menendez with a no-show job. It allegedly went on from there.
“From at least in or about January 2018 through at least in or about June 2022,” the Justice Department indictment alleges, “ … the defendants, and others known and unknown, willfully and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed together and with each other to have a public official, to wit, ROBERT MENENDEZ, act as an agent of a foreign principal, to wit, the Government of Egypt and Egyptian officials.”
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In December 2022, the Justice Department dropped a similar indictment against former Florida congressman David Rivera. Rivera allegedly agreed to receive millions in dollars of payments for work ostensibly performed for a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. In reality, the government alleges, Rivera and an accomplice were using his connections to government officials, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to change U.S. policy toward Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro. The former legislator is charged with failure to register as a foreign agent. (The case has not yet gone to trial.)
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In May 2020, another U.S. senator tried to bring Rivera’s actions to the government’s attention. That, of course, was Menendez.
“Recent press reports and a lawsuit suggest that former Congressman David M. Rivera (R-FL-25) worked on behalf of a foreign principal and conducted activities covered under the registration requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” the letter read. “I therefore request that the Department of Justice review whether Mr. Rivera was in compliance with FARA, including whether he has an obligation to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of the Maduro regime.”
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“ … [T]he last thing we should tolerate,” he wrote at another point, “is a former member of Congress potentially violating U.S. laws as he does the regime’s dirty work in the United States.”
In May of last year, Menendez again wrote a letter seeking to draw the attention of prosecutors to Rivera’s work.
“FARA requires that anyone who agrees to act directly or indirectly on behalf of a foreign principal, including as a ‘public relations counsel, publicity agent, information service employee or political consultant’, register as a foreign agent,” the new letter read.
Those aren’t the quotes from the letters that federal prosecutors included in their superseding indictment of Menendez, though. They picked out the line from the first letter in which Menendez wrote that “acting directly or indirectly in any capacity on behalf of a foreign principal triggers the requirement to register under FARA,” and the line in the second where he argued that if Rivera “carried out work that requires registration under FARA, it is imperative that the Justice Department ensure he is held to account.”
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The indictment then notes that Nadine Menendez and Wael Hana had never registered as foreign agents and that, as a senator — a sitting one, not a former legislator as was the case with Rivera — Menendez was prohibited from doing so at all.
Again, those letters were sent in May 2020 and May 2022, both moments in which Menendez et al. were allegedly involved in the effort to have the senator “act as an agent of a foreign principal.” We should presume Menendez et al. are innocent of the charges against them, given that they have not been proved in court. If they are eventually proved, though, there’s a moral to this story: Don’t insist in writing that people committing certain crimes be punished if you happen to be engaged in similar acts.
Bob Menendez reiterated his innocence in a Thursday statement.
“Piling new charge upon new charge does not make the allegations true,” he said. “The facts haven’t changed, only a new charge. It is an attempt to wear someone down and I will not succumb to this tactic. I again ask people who know me and my record to give me the chance to present my defense and show my innocence.”
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