Senator Robert Menendez’s soon-to-be wife dropped a lot of names during a 2019 meeting she held with a lawyer who later paid off the delinquent mortgage on her Englewood Cliffs, N.J., home, saving it from foreclosure.
But Mr. Menendez’s name was not one of them, the lawyer, John Moldovan, testified on Tuesday in the second week of the senator’s federal bribery trial in Manhattan.
Mr. Moldovan said he was later instructed by his boss, Wael Hana, the owner of a New Jersey-based halal meat certification company, to pay $23,568.54 to a lender that held the mortgage on the home owned by Nadine Menendez, who married the senator in 2020.
Mr. Hana never brought up the senator’s name either, Mr. Moldovan testified.
“Never mentioned his name once to me,” Mr. Moldovan said during cross-examination by Mr. Menendez’s lawyer, Avi Weitzman.
Prosecutors, in building a case against Mr. Menendez, have been trying to show that the senator conspired with his wife, Mr. Hana and another New Jersey businessman, Fred Daibes, to take bribes in exchange for political favors. The mortgage payment that saved Ms. Menendez’s home was among the first payoffs, according to the indictment.
Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have offered the jury a far different narrative, accusing his wife of deceiving him about her dire finances and any payoffs she may have solicited from others.
“She kept him in the dark on what she was asking others to give her,” Mr. Weitzman told jurors.
Ms. Menendez, 57, was supposed to have been on trial with her husband, a New Jersey Democrat. But a judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court, postponed her trial for at least two months to give her time to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Mr. Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty, as have his wife, Mr. Hana and Mr. Daibes.
In the first week of trial, a prosecutor handed jurors bars of gold that the government has said were bribes and showed them photos of the hiding spots in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home where more than $480,000 in cash was discovered during a June 2022 search.
It was unclear from Mr. Moldovan’s testimony whether the mortgage payment was intended to be a loan or an outright gift.
Mr. Moldovan, who worked for Mr. Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, for only three months, said that when he described the mortgage payment to Ms. Menendez as a loan, she became “pretty upset.” Soon after, he said, Mr. Hana told him to transfer the funds immediately without Ms. Menendez’s signature on a promissory note he had drafted.
However, he said, Mr. Hana also instructed him to note on the check that the mortgage payment was a “loan.”
Mr. Hana, Mr. Moldovan testified, “seemed adamant about the fact that he wanted it to be a loan.”
Testimony in the trial is expected to restart next Tuesday after the Memorial Day weekend.
During the first week of trial, Mr. Menendez arrived at court alone or with his lawyers.
But on Monday and Tuesday, Alicia Menendez, the senator’s daughter who works as an anchor on the cable news network MSNBC, attended the proceedings, just as she did during Mr. Menendez’s trial in 2017 on unrelated federal bribery charges in New Jersey. (The jury was unable to reach a verdict after that trial, and the charges were later dismissed.)
This week, Ms. Menendez sat in the first row of the courtroom gallery behind her father, sometimes taking notes, and they chatted in the hallway at breaks.
A spokesman for MSNBC said that Ms. Menendez was in court “in a personal capacity and as a member of the family.”
