Senator Robert Menendez’s bribery trial got underway this week in a Manhattan courtroom eight months after he was first indicted on corruption charges. Jurors received a photographic tour of the New Jersey senator’s home, touched the gold bars at the heart of the case and heard a lawyer for Mr. Menendez pin much of the blame on the senator’s wife.
The government has brought a complicated set of accusations against Mr. Menendez, 70. He is charged with accepting cash, gold and other gifts in exchange for doing favors for the governments of Egypt and Qatar and for several allies in New Jersey.
But this week, prosecutors started simply. “This case is about a public official who put greed first,” said Lara Pomerantz, an assistant U.S. attorney. “A public official who put his own interests above his duty to the people. Who put his power up for sale.”
Two businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, are on trial with Mr. Menendez, accused of plying him with bribes. The senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is also charged; her trial has been delayed. All four have pleaded not guilty.
Here are five takeaways from Mr. Menendez’s first week of trial:
Jurors get to hold one kilogram of gold.
The government’s first witness, Aristotelis Kougemitros, an F.B.I. special agent, took the stand on Thursday to testify about the gold, jewelry and cash seized during a June 2022 search of the Menendezes’ home in New Jersey, giving jurors their first look — and feel — at what prosecutors have called some of the “fruits” of the bribery scheme, including several gold bars.
But Mr. Menendez’s lawyers seemed to score a point when they got Agent Kougemitros to admit that part of his testimony was inaccurate. During a cross-examination of the agent, one of Mr. Menendez’s lawyers, Adam Fee, attempted to show that gold had not been recovered from rooms clearly utilized by the senator, echoing what is emerging as a defense strategy to pin blame on Ms. Menendez.
Mr. Fee focused on the location of a blue blazer containing Senate stationery that Agent Kougemitros said had been found inside a locked closet where gold was discovered. Mr. Fee displayed magnified photos that he said showed that the blazer was hanging not inside the closet but on an adjacent door outside.
“Do you want to change that testimony?” he asked the agent.
When trial resumed on Friday morning, Agent Kougemitros did: The blazer — and Senate papers — had not been inside the closet, he said.
A jury is seated.
Twelve jurors and six alternates were sworn in by Judge Sidney H. Stein on Wednesday, capping two and half days of jury selection that saw many would-be jurors giving unconventional excuses for why they could not serve. (One man described a fear of heights that would keep him from easily attending the trial in a 23rd-floor courtroom.)
The seated jury comprises six men and six women across a range of age groups and ethnicities. The jurors live in Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester County, and several have advanced degrees.
The group includes a retired economist, an entertainment consultant and an investment banker, as well as four people who work in the health care industry. Their news media tastes skew toward traditional newspapers and mainstream outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR. Some rely on social media for their news, and one, on John Oliver’s satirical show.
Only about a third of the jurors live with spouses, while the others live alone or with immediate family members. The group is also big on exercise; among them are a marathon runner, a skier, a swimmer and a jogger.
Ms. Menendez has breast cancer.
On the first day of witness testimony on Thursday, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, made big news that had nothing to do with the bribery charges that he and his wife are facing. Mr. Menendez’s Senate office released a statement — with a Jersey City, N.J., dateline — while he was in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Ms. Menendez, he revealed, had breast cancer and was preparing to undergo a mastectomy. For the first time, it became clear that this was the reason that her trial had been postponed for at least two months.
But the timing of the disclosure punctuated an already remarkable first few days of trial. Notably, it came a day after another of Mr. Menendez’s lawyers, Avi Weitzman, had laid much of the blame for the bribery charges on Ms. Menendez, 57.
Defendants’ strategies emerge.
In pinning responsibility for the senator’s legal troubles on his wife, Mr. Weitzman told the jury that Ms. Menendez had hid her financial challenges from her husband. “She kept him in the dark on what she was asking others to give her,” Mr. Weitzman said. “She tried to get cash and assets any which way she could.”
Lawyers for the senator’s co-defendants, Mr. Hana and Mr. Daibes, both New Jersey businessmen accused in the bribery scheme, have emphasized their clients’ friendships with the couple and said the men were being unfairly prosecuted for their generosity.
Mr. Hana’s lawyer, Lawrence S. Lustberg, accused the government of taking “innocent, even good, positive acts, and trying to make them appear sinister and criminal.”
“It’s about criminalizing friendships,” Mr. Lustberg said.
Mr. Dabies’s lawyer, César de Castro, echoed that view, saying the evidence would show the case was about “deep and long-lasting friendships, not corrupt relationships.”
A halal meat monopoly takes center stage.
On Friday morning, a witness, Bret Tate, took the stand and spent hours taking jurors on a behind-the-scenes tour of halal meat slaughterhouses and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s role in the global import-export market.
Mr. Tate’s testimony shifted the spotlight away from Mr. Menendez for the first time in days, and toward one of his co-defendants, Mr. Hana, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Egypt in 2006. In 2019, the government of Egypt gave Mr. Hana’s business, IS EG Halal, a lucrative monopoly to certify that meat imported to the country had been prepared according to Islamic law. (Until then, four U.S. companies had divided the certification work.)
Mr. Tate, a foreign service officer who in 2019 was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, explained that the U.S.D.A. opposed the monopoly, and that the sudden change increased the cost of meat certification and the price of meat for Egyptian consumers.
The monopoly made Mr. Hana a wealthy man and prosecutors say his business was used to funnel bribes to Mr. Menendez in exchange for the senator’s willingness to steer aid and weapons to Egypt.
