In January 2019, Senator Robert Menendez placed a seven-minute call to New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir Grewal, in what prosecutors say was an effort to quash an insurance fraud case.
A New Jersey businessman, Jose Uribe, had been desperate to make the fraud charges disappear, prosecutors say. He had turned to Nadine Menendez — who married the senator the next year — for help.
In the hours and days before the senator’s call, there was a flurry of communication between Ms. Menendez, Mr. Uribe and a second businessman who is charged with the senator and his wife in an elaborate bribery scheme. Ms. Menendez would often contact the senator soon after texting with the men, sometimes using an alternate phone that the couple referred to as her “007” phone.
The messages were shared Wednesday with jurors over hours of testimony from an F.B.I. special agent during the fourth week of Mr. Menendez’s bribery trial. The agent was responsible for verifying the accuracy of a chart summarizing more than 1,100 pieces of evidence, including emails, texts and voice mail recordings.
Taken together, the messages appeared to be part of the prosecution’s effort to undercut a central element of Mr. Menendez’s defense: that he and his wife lived largely separate lives, and that he was unaware of her interactions with the men now accused of bribing the couple in exchange for political favors from the senator.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York took pains on Wednesday to instead present the senator and his wife as close collaborators who spoke regularly and were intimately involved in mundane details of each other’s daily lives.
Jurors saw one photo Ms. Menendez sent of her feet to the senator after a pedicure and heard about how he often used an iPhone feature called Find My Friends to track her location.
But the text exchanges shown on Wednesday focused largely on twin problems facing Mr. Uribe and Ms. Menendez.
Close associates of Mr. Uribe were under investigation for insurance fraud in New Jersey, including a woman he considered family. And Ms. Menendez’s car had been damaged beyond repair in a December 2018 crash, leaving her scrambling for transportation.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Menendez’s willingness to use his influence in exchange for payoffs offered a solution to both their problems — and an opportunity for one of the first bribes in a yearslong conspiracy: a new Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Mr. Uribe, who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors, has admitted that he arranged for a new Mercedes-Benz for Ms. Menendez in exchange for the senator’s help.
Some of the messages sent to Ms. Menendez included screenshots showing the name of the judge and the defense lawyer handling the insurance fraud case Mr. Uribe was concerned about. Others described the criminal charges that he wanted dismissed. “The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Mr. Uribe wrote to Wael Hana, his friend and business associate who is charged in the conspiracy and is on trial with Mr. Menendez, 70.
The Mercedes replaced a vehicle Ms. Menendez was driving when she struck and killed Richard Koop, 49, in Bogota, N.J., in 2018. Ms. Menendez was not tested for drugs or alcohol afterward and was not charged with wrongdoing.
Jurors will not be told that the crash involved a fatality.
But they were given a glimpse into the senator’s involvement after the crash.
The evidence introduced on Wednesday showed that the senator called Ms. Menendez about 20 minutes later, while she was still at the scene, and that they spoke for more than two minutes. The next day, he texted her: “Hope your ok. I was worried about you. You had a traumatic experience.”
From the trial’s first day, lawyers for the senator made clear that their strategy would be to shift blame to Ms. Menendez, 57. (The judge, Sidney H. Stein, postponed Ms. Menendez’s trial until the summer because she is being treated for breast cancer.) The couple, Mr. Hana and another co-defendant, Fred Daibes, have pleaded not guilty.
The senator’s lawyers have portrayed him as living largely independently from Ms. Menendez. One of the lawyers, Avi Weitzman, has told the jury that Ms. Menendez hid her financial difficulties from the senator, keeping him “in the dark on what she was asking others to give her.”
In a courtroom discussion late Tuesday after jurors were sent home for the day, the parties debated whether certain communications between the Menendezes could be shown to the jury. Prosecutors, for example, wanted to introduce text messages from April 5, 2019, apparently exchanged while Ms. Menendez was picking up the Mercedes.
Mr. Menendez texted her: “Congrats!!! On your cleaning up your emails!!” She soon texted back: “Under 5900 emails now. I’m still here,” indicating she was still at the dealership signing papers.
A prosecutor, Paul M. Monteleoni, told Judge Stein that the texts showed Mr. Menendez “is checking on what she’s doing electronically” and that he had “direct, close involvement in what she’s doing on the day that she is getting the car.”
Judge Stein sided with the government on the issue. “The separateness of their lives is a pretty important part of the defense here,” he said during the discussion, adding that the messages showed “how they were in constant contact on rather quotidian issues.”
The daylong recitation of messages that followed on Wednesday laid the groundwork for the next witness, Mr. Grewal, who left the New Jersey attorney general’s office in 2021 and is expected to testify on Thursday about Mr. Menendez’s outreach concerning the insurance fraud case his office was pursuing.
