U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) and his wife, Nadine Arslanian, were indicted Friday on charges they accepted bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from three New Jersey businessmen seeking the senator’s help with their personal and legal problems.
» READ MORE: From gold bars to a pricey car: All the bribes Sen. Bob Menendez has been accused of accepting over the years
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The 39-page indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in New York accuses Menendez of using his broad powers as New Jersey’s senior senator and ranking member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee to interfere with ongoing prosecutions and influence U.S.-Egypt policy on behalf of the men providing him payoffs.
Menendez balked at the charges in a statement Friday calling them “a smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos” and accusing prosecutors of “repeatedly attempt[ing] to silence [his] voice and dig [his] political grave.”
The indictment also names Arslanian Menendez and the executives — Fred Daibes, a prominent New Jersey builder; Wael Hana, an Egyptian-born businessman and founder of a halal meat certification company, and Jose Uribe, a former insurance agent from Union City, N.J. — as codefendants. All are now facing decades in prison should they be convicted.
Here’s what you need to know about each of the players in the case:
Bob Menendez
Menendez has been involved in New Jersey politics for decades, rising through the ranks of rough-and-tumble Hudson County to become mayor of Union City, N.J., in 1986. He was elected to Congress in the 1990s and appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2006 by Gov. Jon Corzine to fill a vacancy. He has served there since.
He was reelected in 2018 in the aftermath of his mistrial on federal bribery charges, consolidating support in the Democratic Party and defeating a well-funded Republican candidate despite the negative publicity associated with the case. Menendez faces reelection next year.
» READ MORE: From gold bars to pricey cars: All the bribes Sen. Bob Menendez has been accused of taking over the years
Nadine Arslanian Menendez
Menendez’s wife since 2019, Nadine Arslanian Menendez is described in the indictment as an intermediary between Menendez and the three co-indicted businessmen, who were friends of hers before her relationship with Menendez began. She also acted as a conduit between Menendez and international government officials, prosecutors said.
The pair met at an IHOP in Union City in 2018, according to a New York Times story profiling love stories, and then got engaged at the foot of the Taj Mahal on a trip to India in October 2019. They married a year later in Queens.
Nadine Menendez was born in Lebanon to Armenian parents, who fled during the Lebanese civil war. They emigrated to the United States when she was a child and settled in New York.
She has a master’s degree in French from New York University and raised two children in Bergen County. She wasn’t working when she began dating Menendez but started an international consulting company, Strategic International Business Consultants, shortly after, in June 2019.
The day she filed paperwork to start her business, her split-level home in Englewood Cliffs, which she now shares with Menendez, was foreclosed on, according to court records.
The indictment alleges that Nadine Menendez received a luxury car, gold bars, help with her mortgage, and consultant fees for facilitating meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials. Prosecutors charge that the couple received bribes in exchange for Menendez’s political influence.
Nadine Menendez was also present for a series of meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials, where the government alleges the couple traded influence for bribes. In March 2020 she allegedly texted an Egyptian official, “anytime you need anything, you have my number and we will make everything happen.”
Wael Hana
Known as Will, he’s an Egyptian American businessman who prosecutors say was able to secure a business monopoly in Egypt with Menendez’s help.
He was friends with Menendez’s wife, Nadine, for years before she began dating the senator and later leveraged that relationship to gain access to Menendez, according to the indictment.
Over several years, Hana worked to introduce Menendez to Egyptian intelligence and military officials. In exchange for Menendez’s pledge to facilitate military sales and financing to Egypt, Hana promised to give the senator’s wife a no-show job and other gifts, prosecutors say.
Hana operated a company called IS EG Halal Certified Inc. that won an exclusive contract from the Egyptian government to certify U.S. food exports to that country for halal compliance. Menendez used his office to try to get the U.S. Agriculture Department to back off its criticism that the monopoly had resulted in increased costs for American meat suppliers.
In return, Hana gave Menendez’s wife $23,000 to cover mortgage payments and directed tens of thousands of dollars more to her no-show consulting business, according to the indictment.
Other gifts from Hana included two one-ounce gold bars — worth $1,800 each — as well as two exercise machines and an air purifier, the government said.
Jose Uribe
A New Jersey businessman, Uribe was an associate and friend of Hana’s. By the time Uribe was on Menendez’s radar, he’d been convicted of fraud and had his insurance broker’s license revoked.
In 2019, Uribe and Hana bought a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000 for the Menendezes. In return, the senator attempted to interfere in two state criminal investigations involving Uribe’s associate and employee, prosecutors say, including one in which his own conduct was implicated.
Menendez pressured a senior prosecutor in the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office to resolve the investigations in a manner favorable to the defendants, according to the indictment. The prosecutor did not act on that request.
In April 2019, Nadine Menendez left her husband a voice mail saying she was going “to meet Jose for five minutes” — and then met Uribe in a restaurant parking lot, where he gave her $15,000 in cash, the indictment says. The next day she bought the convertible, making a $15,000 down payment.
After Nadine Menendez made the purchase, Uribe messaged her: “Are you happy?”
“I will never forget this,” she responded, according to prosecutors.
Later that year, after Menendez met with a prosecutor over one of the criminal investigations into Uribe’s associates, the senator and his wife had a celebratory dinner with Uribe. The indictment features a photo of them toasting with a bottle of champagne.
Fred Daibes
A New Jersey real estate developer and banker, Daibes was a business associate of Hana’s and fundraiser for Menendez, according to the indictment.
Federal prosecutors charged Daibes in 2018 with obtaining loans under false pretenses.
The indictment unsealed Friday alleges that between 2020 and 2022, Menendez used his sway over the appointment process of U.S. attorneys to attempt to influence Daibes’ prosecution in exchange for cash, furniture, and gold bars.
