The Ballad of Bob & Nadine

Senator & Mrs. Menendez are under indictment for serious crimes. For the good of the country and the Democratic Party, he must resign.

Stuff six figures in my damn air mattress,
Uh, I’m in love with large bills. . .
—Rick Ross, “Hello Good Morning”

LAST WEEK, U.S. Senator Robert “Bob” Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and, until Friday, longtime chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted by the Southern District of New York on bribery charges: one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, one count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right.

If those charges sound serious, that’s because they are. Taken together, they carry a maximum penalty of 45 years in prison. Menendez is almost 70. If convicted, he may well spend the rest of his life behind bars. And if the allegations are true—which, spoiler alert, they almost certainly are—he abused his considerable power for his and his wife’s own personal gain, selling out to a foreign nation, and making all of us Americans less safe in the process. Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect a hundred grand in gold bars.

The indictment is damning. Here is the summary—and it’s important to read and digest these four paragraphs:

ROBERT MENENDEZ is the senior U.S. Senator from New Jersey and currently the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (“SFRC”). NADINE MENENDEZ began dating MENENDEZ in February 2018, they became engaged in October 2019, and they married in October 2020. Shortly after they began dating in 2018, NADINE MENENDEZ introduced MENENDEZ to her long-time friend WAEL HANA, who is originally from Egypt, lived in New Jersey, and maintained close connections with Egyptian officials. HANA was also business associates with FRED DAIBES, a New Jersey real estate developer and long-time donor to MENENDEZ, and JOSE URIBE, who worked in the New Jersey insurance and trucking business.

Between 2018 and 2022, MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes from HANA, DAIBES, and URIBE. These bribes included gold, cash, a luxury convertible, payments toward NADINE MENENDEZ’s home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job for NADINE MENENDEZ, home furnishings, and other things of value. In June 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at the New Jersey home of MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ. During that search, the FBI found many of the fruits of this bribery scheme, including cash, gold, the luxury convertible, and home furnishings. Over $480,000 in cash—much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe—was discovered in the home, as well as over $70,000 in cash in NADINE MENENDEZ’s safe deposit box, which was also searched pursuant to a separate search warrant. Some of the envelopes contained the fingerprints and/or DNA of DAIBES or his driver. Other of the envelopes were found inside jackets bearing MENENDEZ’s name and hanging in his closet, as depicted below.

During this same search, agents also found home furnishings provided by HANA and DAIBES, the luxury vehicle paid for by URIBE parked in the garage, as well as over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold bars in the home, which were provided by either HANA or DAIBES. Two of the gold bars DAIBES provided are depicted in the photographs below.

In exchange for these and other things of value, MENENDEZ agreed to use his power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect HANA, URIBE, and DAIBES’s interests and to benefit the Government of Egypt. Through this corrupt relationship, MENENDEZ agreed to take a series of official acts and breaches of his official duty.  First, MENENDEZ took actions to benefit the Government of Egypt and HANA, including by improperly pressuring an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) to seek to protect a business monopoly granted to HANA by Egypt. Second, MENENDEZ took actions seeking to disrupt a criminal investigation undertaken by the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General (“NJAG”) related to URIBE and his associates. Third, MENENDEZ recommended that the President nominate a U.S. Attorney who MENENDEZ believed he could influence with respect to DAIBES and sought to disrupt a federal criminal prosecution undertaken by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey (“USAO-DNJ”) of DAIBES.

In addition to the physical evidence, there was ample communication between the parties. For example, after Uribe gave Nadine 15 grand to use as the down payment on her Benz, she texted her husband a photo of the new ride and this message: “Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes.❤️” And that was hardly the lone incriminating text message unearthed by the FBI.

So either 1) some unknown sinister operatives broke into the Menendez home and planted half a million dollars in cash, some gold bars, and a new Mercedes—somehow bathing that evidence with the DNA of Daibes and his driver—and, on top of that, fabricated many, many text messages on five different cell phones, all to set Menendez up and bring him down; 2) the DOJ employed some fiction writers to invent the whole thing because they have it out for the guy; or 3) Bob and Nadine dunnit.

Menendez, for his part, appears to believe some combination of #1 and #2. “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” one of our loudest senators said in a statement. “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists.”

Who these “forces behind the scenes” are, Menendez does not say. But he takes issue with the prosecutors, who he suggests are overzealous at best, corrupt at worst. “The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent. They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office,” Bob said, as if the squirreling away of bricks of Benjamins in bomber jackets in a walk-in closet is a time-honored Senate tradition dating back to the days of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

Then, with great indignance, Bob defends the honor of the beloved, blameless helpmate he proposed to, on video, in front of the Taj Mahal. (The real one, not the Trump property in Atlantic City.) “On top of that,” he spits, “not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

Before Bob met the former Nadine Arslanian, you see, she was already pals with Wael Hana, the Egypt-born New Jersey businessman with close ties to Cairo. We don’t yet know when they first met, or where, or what the nature of their relationship might involve. All we can say for sure is that she dresses like she’s going to fly to Nice on a PJ with a Russian oligarch.

Nadine is well traveled. Her parents were Armenians living in Lebanon. She was born in Beirut. She left her native country during the Lebanese civil war. She then lived in Greece, Great Britain, California, and New York before winding up on the other side of the Hudson River—specifically, at an IHOP in Union City, New Jersey. It was at that unlikely place, in December 2018, that the owner of said franchise restaurant introduced Nadine to the Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—thus putting the “international” in International House of Pancakes.

“He was very intelligent and had a great sense of humor,” Nadine would later tell the Style writer at the New York Times writing about their marriage, “and he was very, very hot.” This demonstrated either a profound lack of judgment or a natural facility for telling lies.

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Before Nadine met Bob, he was, if reporting from Gawker is to be believed, living his best life as a divorced man in Washington:

When the Senate was in session, [Menendez’s] former neighbor said, Menendez would usually stay at the DC apartment on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings—on weekends, Mondays, and Fridays, he would go back to his New Jersey home. Of those three weeknights, the neighbor said, Menendez usually spent at least two with a constantly rotating gallery of attractive, young, and loud women….

Without fail, the neighbor said, these women would leave Menendez’s apartment at 3 a.m. and get in a cab. “My wife would be up because of the noise, and she’d watch them out the window,” the neighbor said. “They were always in like four-inch heels, and it was definitely a different one every time. Different women on back-to-back nights. These were very young, very attractive women.”

For all I know, that lurid report is complete horseshit, although it’s a strange story for an actual downstairs neighbor and his wife to concoct. The Gawker scoop was published in 2012, around the time the Daily Caller accused him—falsely, as it turned out—of sex tourism in the Dominican Republic. By then Menendez had been divorced for years from his first wife—the mother of his two children, the Congressman and the MSNBC host—and was apparently actively playing the field; in December 2013, he got engaged (although that wound up not working out). The point is, Bob was not some celibate, involuntary or otherwise; if he were, the Daily Caller story wouldn’t have stuck. I mention all of this not because I care about Menendez’s sex life—that is terrain I would prefer not to explore, believe me—but because it reveals something about his character.

This was also the tail end of a period of time (2006-13) when Bob was accepting “lavish” gifts and campaign donations from Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist and his bestie, while also (allegedly) using his pull as senator to help Melgen’s interests, both business and romantic. (Supreme Court Justices can do that, but not U.S. Senators.) The situation was so egregious that in April 2015, Menendez was indicted by the District of New Jersey on one count of conspiracy, one count of violating the travel act, eight counts of bribery, three counts of honest services fraud, and one count of making false statements. According to the 2015 indictment:

Menendez accepted flights on Melgen’s private jet, a first-class commercial flight and a flight on a chartered jet; numerous vacations at Melgen’s Caribbean villa in the Dominican Republic and at a hotel room in Paris; and $40,000 in contributions to his legal defense fund and over $750,000 in campaign contributions. Menendez never disclosed any of the reportable gifts that he received from Melgen on his financial disclosure forms.   

According to allegations in the indictment, during this same time period, Menendez allegedly engaged in three efforts to use his Senate office and staff to advocate on behalf of Melgen’s personal and financial interests. First, Menendez allegedly pressured executive agencies in connection with a conflict between Melgen and the government of the Dominican Republic relating to a disputed contract that Melgen purchased to provide exclusive screening of containers coming through Dominican ports. Second, Menendez allegedly advocated on behalf of Melgen in connection with a Medicare billing dispute worth approximately $8.9 million to Melgen. Third, Menendez allegedly took active steps to support the tourist and student visa applications of three of Melgen’s girlfriends, as well as the visa application of the younger sister of one of Melgen’s girlfriends. Throughout these efforts, Menendez allegedly engaged in advocacy for Melgen all the way up to the highest levels of the U.S. government, including meeting with a U.S. cabinet secretary, contacting a U.S. Ambassador, meeting with the heads of executive agencies and other senior executive officials and soliciting other U.S. Senators, all in order to assist Melgen’s personal and pecuniary interests. 

Even a cursory read reveals that charges in the 2015 indictment are…not all that different from the charges in the 2023 indictment, except for the fact that Melgen was not serving the interests of a foreign government (as far as we know).

Maybe this is just, you know, how Bob rolls?

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Back to the present. In his public statements, Menendez suggested that bigotry is motivating these “forces behind the scenes.” He isn’t being targeted because he’s corrupt, you see; he’s being targeted because he’s Cuban. “Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction,” his statement goes.

Speaking to reporters yesterday—his first appearance since the indictment—Bob explained that even the half-mil in cash strewn about his sport-coats and sweaters was a habit he picked up from his parents, who grew up in Communist Cuba and therefore didn’t trust the banks. It’s a cultural thing, Menendez suggested, to hide enough cash to buy a house in a house. “This might seem old-fashioned,” he conceded, as if that were the only adjective an objective human might use to describe doing that.

At the same press conference, a “defiant” Menendez insisted he will not resign. And why should he? As he had already made clear in his statement, those pesky “forces behind the scenes” “see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.” By standing his ground, he is doing right by the people of New Jersey, blah blah blah.

Responding to a federal indictment by attacking the integrity of the DOJ is something Trump would do—check that: has done, repeatedly. It’s not a good look for anyone, especially a high-ranking Democrat.

That conspiratorial cri de coeur has been a big hit in the rightwing media, who have pounced on that angle. Matt Gertz at Media Matters has a nice roundup of the wackadoodle MAGA pundit responses. The CEO of The Federalist tweeted, “My contempt for DOJ is so total, and my trust in it so non-existent, that even though I have zero doubt Menendez is corrupt, my immediate assumption is that this indictment is bogus and that he must’ve done something to block the regime’s policy goals to earn it.” (Regime, from the Latin regere, meaning to rule, implies that President Biden is some sort of king.) Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, who two months ago was calling for Biden’s execution, opined that DOJ indicted Menendez, a Democrat, “to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.” By being publicly defiant while impugning the Justice Department in the face of damning evidence of guilt, Bob is only feeding the MAGA narrative.

“I have been falsely accused before because I refused to back down to the powers that be,” Menendez said, alluding to his aforementioned 2015 indictment, “and the people of New Jersey were able to see through the smoke and mirrors and recognize I was innocent.”

The 2017 trial ended in a hung jury, so not all the people of New Jersey recognized his innocence. “Certain elements of the FBI and of our state cannot stand, or even worse, accept that the Latino kid from Union City and Hudson County could grow up to be a United States senator and be honest,” Bob proclaimed back then, after the judge declared the mistrial.

The DOJ declined to re-try the case. Menendez’s defense attorney—voting rights champion Marc Elias, of all people—said that “the proceedings clearly demonstrated that there was no violation of any law.”

Bob’s Senate colleagues did not agree. If the people of New Jersey saw smoke and mirrors, the Senate Ethics Committee saw the forest and the trees. In 2018, that Committee—which included Democratic Senators Christopher Coons, Brian Schatz, and Jeanne Shaheen—smacked him but good. Here is the money shot from the four-page letter that “severely admonished” him (boldface mine):

The Committee has found that over a six-year period you knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from Dr. Melgen without obtaining required Committee approval, and that you failed to publicly disclose certain gifts as required by Senate Rule and federal law. Additionally, while accepting these gifts, you used your position as a Member of the Senate to advance Dr. Melgen's personal and business interests. The Committee has determined that this conduct violated Senate Rules, federal law, and applicable standards of conduct.

Remember when Biden called up Mitch McConnell a few weeks ago to ask about his health, and everyone on social media freaked out? The Senate is like that. It’s a much cozier environment than the House, where troglodytes like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene hold sway. For Bob’s Senate colleagues to reprimand him like that is a BFD.

Hiding in that letter is another humdinger of a sentence: “Notably, you have not disputed the fact that you accepted numerous gifts from Dr. Melgen and took official actions related to his interests.” That’s a roundabout way of saying, “Bob, dude, you fucking admitted you did the thing you were accused of.”

In his statement this past weekend, Menendez insisted that he would “not be distracted by baseless allegations.” Baseless? Really? I mean, we saw the gold bars and the bundles of banknotes and the Mercedes. We read the indictment. He may well be found not guilty in a court of law, but to call the charges “baseless” is a bit rich—again: something Trump would do, and has done. But that, Bob argues, is the fault of the prosecutors, who are after all just agents of the “forces behind the scenes” that are the authors of all his woe: “They wrote these charges as they wanted; the facts are not as presented. Prosecutors did that the last time and look what a trial demonstrates. People should remember that before accepting the prosecutor’s version.”

People should remember what he tells them, but the astute ones will remember that last time, there was a mistrial on account of a hung jury. That’s not the same as being found not guilty, whatever Bob and his lawyer claim.

“To my supporters, friends and the community at large, I ask that you recall the other times the prosecutors got it wrong and that you reserve judgment,” he said, wrapping up his statement. “I am confident that this matter will be successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.”

His fellow New Jerseyans do see it for what it is. That’s why they’re the ones calling for his resignation. The governor, Phil Murphy. The state Democratic Party chair. Representatives Bill Pascrell Jr., Andy Kim, Frank Pallone, Jr., and Mikie Sherrill. All Democrats. All from the Garden State. (Republican politicians, in New Jersey and beyond, have been notably silent on the matter.)

It’s Bob’s colleagues in the cozy confines of the Senate who have been reluctant to call him out. As of this writing, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio are the only two senators to publicly call for Bob’s resignation.

“Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey,” said Chuck Schumer, displaying the flaccid, wishy-washy leadership style that has plagued his brief, fruitless run as Senate Majority Leader. “He has a right to due process and a fair trial. Senator Menendez has rightly decided to step down temporarily from his position as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee until the matter has been resolved.”

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Al Franken resigned from the Senate because of an old photo from an old comedy bit. It was a polarizing decision, but he stepped down, I think, so his fellow Democrats could maintain the moral high ground: so the party could not be accused of hypocrisy. If true, what Menendez did was abusing his position for the benefit of a foreign nation. How can the Democrats condemn Trump for (allegedly) stealing classified documents when they protect Menendez for a similar, serious (alleged) crime?

Bob Menendez has been a good senator, as far as the job itself goes. He knows how to get stuff done. He’s a champion of democracy and an enemy of authoritarian regimes. Institutional memory is also important in government, and he brings plenty. But he has become a liability, and he must go.

Think of it this way: If Menendez resigns and is subsequently acquitted—or if he walks away with a hung jury, like last time he was indicted on corruption charges—then those now calling for his resignation will look like they jumped the gun—like Kirsten Gillibrand, the first to call for Franken to resign, looks right now. Bob would be vindicated. We’d lose a reliable Democrat in the Senate. It would be unfortunate, but that’s an outcome we can live with.

If Menendez doesn’t resign and is subsequently convicted, then those not now calling for his resignation—looking at you, Leader Schumer—will look like criminal enablers, partisan hacks, and gullible fools, no different than the MAGA Republicans. The whataboutist scripts will write themselves. With democracy at the precipice, this is an outcome we can ill afford.

It all boils down to this: Is the indictment compelling? Is it within the realm of possibility that a politician who previously took what looked like bribes would do so again, in concert with his new wife? Do you believe his explanation for why he had $550,000 in cash and $100,000 in gold bars stashed in his house?

I am confident that this matter will be successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.

If you ask me, what it is is what it looks like: egregious corruption. I’m happy to be wrong. But we don’t have the luxury of time to wait and see.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece said that the hung jury was 10 to convict, 2 to acquit; it was the other way around. Thanks to readers for pointing this out.