Credit: (AP Photo/Jeenah Moon)

As New Jersey reeled from the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez was allegedly working a side deal and urging local mayors to use a testing laboratory that happened to be paying his wife. 

That’s one of the latest — and more striking — accusations to come out of the federal indictments facing New Jersey’s senior senator, a Democrat, and one of the first affecting the everyday lives of his constituents.  

According to the filing by New York federal prosecutors, Menendez in late 2020 and early 2021 contacted “certain New Jersey mayors seeking to convince them to authorize” the lab his wife was associated with to test for COVID-19 infections. It’s unclear how the senator contacted these mayors, and information in the filing is limited to a few sentences. 

But the latest accusation is already being contested, part of the ongoing pretrial back-and-forth in this case, scheduled for trial in May.

The CEO of the laboratory — unnamed in the filing — denied Menendez “ever made calls on behalf” of the company, prosecutors said in a new court filing. 

Separately, a public health official in one of the cities where Menendez allegedly pressed a mayor on the lab issue said the mayor had recommended the company to them, but they had not felt “any pressure to use” that particular lab, according to the court document. 

Names remain unknown  

The names of the company, CEO, health official and any of the mayors Menendez is accused of contacting are not listed in the filing. 

A spokesman for Menendez, who has not said if he will run for reelection, referred questions about the court papers to the lawyers for the senator. The lead attorney defending Menendez did not comment. The filing is the latest salvo from federal prosecutors in Manhattan who have accused Menendez and his wife, Nadine, of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for political favors to help the governments of Egypt and Qatar. 

Menendez and his wife, who wed in 2020, have both pleaded not guilty, as have three businessmen charged in the alleged scheme. 

This latest accusation dates to when COVID-19 swept New Jersey and the rest of the world, upending society. 

By the end of 2020, COVID-19 had killed more than 19,000 New Jerseyans, according to figures the state health department compiled. As of this week, the number of deaths in the state from the disease surpassed 36,000, a number widely viewed as an undercount.

To date, more than 1.17 million people in the United States have died from COVID-19, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health organization. 

Applying pressure

Vaccines against COVID-19 were just coming into public use during the period when Menendez is said to have pressed mayors about the lab.   

The filing did not detail how or why Menendez’s wife, Nadine, was paid by the lab.

In the latest filing, prosecutors said the evidence of Menendez’s conduct was obtained through a range of investigative methods, including a confidential source. Investigators have also used warrants for cellphone records, email accounts and other private channels to gain information about the senator’s activities, court papers show. 

Those warrants have been contested, however, and last month, Menendez asked the judge overseeing the case to throw out five search warrants government investigators had used to search his home. 

The searches were too broad and should not have been granted because the U.S. government deceived judges to obtain warrants, Menendez said. 

In particular, he said warrants to access his cellphone, email account and an Apple account led to FBI agents’ “exploratory rummaging.” 

Federal prosecutors have defended the warrants and the process to obtain them. “Indeed, Menendez does not identify a single alleged misstatement,” the prosecutors said in part, calling the senator’s choice to challenge the warrants and suppress the information they gleaned “baffling.” 

In other developments in the new filing, prosecutors also said a diamond engagement ring for Menendez to give to his wife, Nadine, was part of the bribery scheme. 

A friend of Nadine’s named Wael Hana, one of the other defendants in the case, had arranged for her to receive the engagement ring and a car as payment for the senator’s help in “resolving criminal charges for insurance fraud pending against an American male,” prosecutors said. 

That information came to prosecutors through a confidential source, they said.