The bribery charges filed Friday against New Jersey senior U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez center on allegations Menendez and his wife Nadine engaged in a “corrupt relationship” that protected three New Jersey businessmen and benefited the Egyptian government. Prosecutors indicated the investigation is ongoing.
With “charges of bribery and corruption and Hobbs Act extortion,” said Chris Gramiccioni, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, “you have to prove a specific or explicit quid pro quo, a this-for-that, and they lay that out … clinically.”
The prosecutors in the case “focus not just on the obvious, like payments and official use of authority or official use of influence, but they go into great detail about the evidence that they’ve had,” Gramiccioni said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “Oftentimes what you’ll see in corruption cases is that defendants will try to use an intermediary or a middle person … And in this case, it seems to be alleged that that middle person was Senator Menendez’s wife.”
In addition, “They tie up that timeline quite tight. That’s one of the things I noticed that was different from the one six years ago,” Gramiccioni said, referring to Menendez’s trial on unrelated corruption claims that led to a hung jury and a judge’s dismissal of some counts.
“I can’t read the senator’s mind, but I have a feeling after that jury hung six years ago, he probably felt emboldened and largely invincible, because it’s very rare that the Department of Justice will circle back on a separate federal prosecution like this,” Gramiccioni said.
