In the third week of U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez’s federal corruption trial, after the bags of cash and gold bars had been entered into evidence, jurors listened intently to a voicemail his wife left back in 2018, when the pair were still dating.
“Hi, it’s me, calling my very handsome senator,” Nadine Arslanian said on the recording. “I have a favor to ask you.”
It was very important Menendez meet with a certain Egyptian general during an upcoming embassy function in Washington, Nadine said. Even just a few minutes would be “good for the relations between Egypt and the United States, among other things.”
What other things? It’s a long story, one prosecutors are painstakingly unfurling in a U.S. district courthouse in Manhattan, where New Jersey’s senior senator faces his second bribery trial.
Federal authorities say Menendez and his wife took cash, gold, a Mercedes and other luxury goods from a small cadre of wealthy New Jersey businessmen to help them land deals in Egypt and Qatar through the senator’s influence on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, among other political favors.
The allegations are all over the place, from your typical Jersey capers, like meddling in criminal investigations involving rich friends, to landing one of Nadine’s pals a lucrative contract involving meat exports to Egypt.
Menendez, a Democrat, is now the first sitting U.S. congressman to face charges of conspiring to act as a foreign agent, violating a federal law meant to ensure U.S. officials act in the nation’s interest.
He has denied wrongdoing, claiming federal prosecutors are out to get him after his last corruption case ended in mistrial. So, too, has his wife — who is being tried separately later this summer after she undergoes cancer treatment.
‘BLAME MY WIFE’ DEFENSE
The Menendez marriage is now at the center of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Damian Williams’ case against the third-term senator from New Jersey, whose influence reverberated from his political home base in Hudson County to the halls of power in Washington.
Prosecutors say Nadine acted as “a go-between” who “passed messages to Menendez” and collected many of the bribes from their wealthy friends in order to keep the senator’s hands clean.
Bob’s attorneys say Nadine — “a beautiful and tall international woman” fluent in four languages — was “hiding her financial challenges from Bob” and kept him “in the dark” about her business dealings.
It’s been dubbed the “Blame My Wife” defense, a bold strategy in any marriage and any court room, let alone the corruption trial of a sitting U.S. senator tasked with handling sensitive government intel.
Federal prosecutors aren’t buying it.
To make their case, they’ve taken jurors into the couple’s most intimate spaces, bringing them on a detailed, Zillow-style tour of their home and showing them hundreds of photos from an FBI search that turned up half a million dollars in cash and 13 gold bars stashed in closets, bags and boxes.
They have also slid into the couple’s DMs and captured the receipts as criminal evidence, submitting pages upon pages of private romantic texts, emails and voice messages over hours of testimony this week.
The new records shed light on the relationship between the senator, his wife and a trio of rich entrepreneurs whose friendships with the Menendez couple overlapped with their business ties to Nadine.
Two of those men — Edgewater developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman — are on trial alongside Bob Menendez.
They have also denied wrongdoing, saying prosecutors mistook generous gifts for bribes, effectively “criminalizing friendship.”
Both previously married international travelers with a well-documented taste for the high life, Bob and Nadine Menendez wed in 2020 after Menendez, not shy about public displays of affection, proposed through song.
Privately, their language was equally effusive, exchanging heart emojis and French-inflected pet names like “mon fiance parfait” and “mon amour de la vie” between phones.
“Good luck at the meeting my love,” said one message from Nadine to her husband. “Thank you for checking on me you make me feel so special ❤ “
Nadine Menendez, whose past experience involved founding a professional sports management company, also gave her husband occasional updates about her entrepreneurial activities.
“Mon amour de la vie, merci for my resumé,” she wrote in one text after Bob helped her punch up her bona fides as she sought a position on a nonprofit board.
What line of work was Nadine Menendez in? Strategic international business consulting, a service she offered through a company called, appropriately, Strategic International Business Consultants.
Still confused? Let her explain.
“Every time I’m a middle person for a deal I am asking to get paid,” she texted a relative, court documents show, “and this is my consulting company.”
Prosecutors suggest a different business model: selling access to her powerful husband.
THE HALAL HUSTLE
In April 2019, the Menendez home in Englewood Cliffs had suffered damage from a flood, and Nadine was upset that her longtime-friend and sometimes-business partner, Will, wasn’t helping fix her floors.
“You did not have one minute to text me on the way to the airport?” she wrote in a text message. “It’s Monday. You promised me the guy would come for the carpet. But I’m sure you’ll be able to answer the phone about next Monday’s meetings and dinner.”
Wael Hana, known to friends as Will, did not reply. He was away in Egypt on business and preparing for a meeting with the senator and some business associates.
The former executive of a trucking business that went under after suffering damage during Hurricane Sandy, Hana had recently gotten into the import-export industry.
Specifically, meat. More specifically, halal beef.
Hana was making meetings around the U.S., looking to break into the business of certifying beef set for export as halal, or slaughtered under Islamic traditions, court records show.
His company, IS EG Halal Certified Inc., was based in an Edgewater office complex owned by Fred Daibes, the “Gold Coast” developer known for glitzy projects along the Hudson riverfront and a codefendant in the scheme.
Hana also hired his friend, Nadine, writing her consulting company several $10,000 checks, court records show,
Not long after he got into the business, Hana obtained an exclusive contract with the Egyptian government to certify beef headed there from the U.S.
Previously, four companies around the U.S. could certify beef headed for export, but these days? If you want to send your beef to Egypt, you better go through Hana.
How did he land the lucrative deal? By Hana’s telling, through pure Jersey hustle.
Most Muslim-majority countries require such certifications to sell imported meat, making halal certification big business, and Hana, who is Christian but was born in Egypt, had a family background in food wholesaling.
Prosecutors argue Menendez worked the levers of power in Washington for his wife’s wealthy friend to corner the market in exchange for a no-show job.
When a top U.S. agricultural official raised questions about the meat monopoly, Menendez called the official, Ted McKinney, and told him to “quit interfering with my constituent,” McKinney testified this week.
Menendez’s lawyers say that’s the usual work of a senator — advocating for a business in his backyard. Prosecutors contend Menendez was throwing his weight around for Hana to make more money for his wife.
The now-infamous gold bars? Some came from Hana, prosecutors say. So did the Mercedes convertible, mortgage payments, those new carpets after the flood and an elliptical exercise machine, among other goods.
Hana’s attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, told jurors Will and Nadine were old friends, “like brother and sister,” who exchanged gifts and favors.
Nadine helped Will out when his business fell on hard times, and he returned the favor with loans when she had her own financial struggles, he said.
“There was never, ever, a time when Will Hana provided things of value to Senator Menendez directly, or through his girlfriend and later wife Nadine, in exchange for an official action,” Lustberg said at the trial’s opening. “It just didn’t happen.”
Privately, Nadine complained to Bob and others about Hana, saying he “now thinks he’s king of the world and has both countries wrapped around his pinky.”
“Can you believe Will said he does not need me to make appointments with you to go see you at your office and have dinner with you?” Nadine texted her husband in March 2019.
“The man has gone crazy after everything I’ve done for him!!!!!”
“He is crazy,” her husband replied.
Prosecutors say the Menendez couple funneled sensitive U.S. government information from Bob’s senate office to Nadine and on to Hana, who passed it along to Egyptian officials.
“Tell Will I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today,” Bob texted Nadine in July 2018, providing a tally of thousands of target practice rounds and tank ammunition in exchange for $99 million. He also passed along details about the number of American and Egyptian citizens working at the U.S. embassy in Cairo.
Menendez’s lawyers say he never shared any information that wasn’t either public or soon to be public. Still, the Egyptian officials were pleased with the intel.
After Hana shared the information over WhatsApp, Khaled Shawky, an Egyptian military official and diplomat, replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
“Any time,” Hana replied. “People should repay the kindness.”
The trial is expected to last several more weeks, with testimony still to come from a third New Jersey businessman, Jose Uribe, who has pleaded guilty to bribing the Menendez couple and is expected to take the stand against them.
Menendez has been largely abandoned by his fellow Democrats but may mount an independent bid this year to keep his seat in the Senate if he is “exonerated” at trial.
He has not said whether he will take the stand.
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