NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JULY 09: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) leaves Manhattan Federal Court on July 09, 2024 in New York City. Prosecutors wrapped up closing arguments, giving way to the defense to begin in Sen. Menendez’s trial. Menendez is charged with corruption after gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash were found at his home. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, are accused of extortion, obstruction of justice and accepting bribes to perform favors for businessmen with connections to Egypt and Qatar. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
A federal judge has denied Bob Menendez’s bid for a new trial, rejecting defense claims that New Jersey’s former senior senator and his co-defendants did not get a fair trial because the jury was exposed to insufficiently redacted evidence during their deliberations.
In a 14-page order issued Wednesday, Judge Sidney H. Stein said defense attorneys had two days to review exhibits before they were loaded onto a laptop for jurors to consult as needed in the jury room, yet the lawyers didn’t spot “the miniscule amount of extra-record material” that prosecutors uploaded to the device in an apparent error.
“The extra-record material was a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence,” Stein wrote. “All defense counsel as well as the government attorneys — acutely attuned to the evidence in this case — failed to notice the improper redactions during their preparation and review of the jury laptop, and for a full four months thereafter.”
The jury probably didn’t notice the material either, Stein wrote.
Jurors only deliberated 12 hours before declaring Menendez and co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes guilty on all counts in a complex, international bribery scheme, the judge said. That’s “an impossibly small amount of time” for jurors to have discovered the improper documents, especially given that they didn’t come up at all during the trial, he wrote.
“Defendants posit that the jury was a team of super sleuths, determined to uncover a few bits of information — that it had no reason to know existed — sprinkled on a few of pages within tens of thousands of pages of evidence,” Stein wrote. “Even in the infinitesimal chance that the jury happened upon this evidence, there is similarly a miniscule likelihood that the jury would have understood it, much less attribute the significance to these exhibits that the defendants now do.”
Besides, he added, defense attorneys did not ask for additional time to review the jury laptop before deliberations began and bear just as much responsibility as prosecutors to ensure the proper evidence was there.
He denied the Menendez team’s request for discovery to determine why prosecutors erred and why they wiped the laptop clean after the July verdict.
Defense attorneys had speculated that prosecutors did not make an innocent mistake, as they claimed, when they loaded the improperly redacted exhibits to jurors’ laptop.
But Stein found no evidence of that and rejected Menendez’s claim that not ordering a new trial would incentivize attorneys to “intentionally try to pull a fast one” and sneak extra-record material into the jury room.
“As the facts lay bare, there is no indication that this error was anything other than pure inadvertence — which Menendez concedes,” Stein wrote.
He added that he was unpersuaded that wiping the laptop clean was anything other than a routine procedure to prepare the laptop for use in other cases.
“The defendants were not prejudiced such that a new trial is required,” Stein concluded.
Defense attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Menendez went to social media to blast prosecutors’ “misconduct.”
“We respectfully disagree with the Court’s decision and expect the Court of Appeals will hold these prosecutors to account for their misconduct,” he wrote on X. “To think that prosecutors can put unconstitutional and inadmissible evidence in front of the jury, assure the defense they only provided the jury with admitted exhibits, and escape any consequences, is outrageous. This is precisely the sort of misconduct by prosecutors that has caused so many to question the motives and judgments of overzealous prosecutors who act above the law and believe they are unanswerable to anyone.”
Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 29 in Manhattan. Menendez, 71, faces 24 to 30 years in prison under sentencing guidelines, but prosecutors are seeking a 15-year sentence, citing his age. Defense attorneys have suggested 21 to 27 months of incarceration.
Prosecutors showed over nine weeks of trial testimony last spring and summer that Hana and Daibes showered Menendez and his wife, Nadine, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes including cash, gold bars, paychecks for a fake job for Nadine Menendez, a luxury Mercedes-Benz convertible, and more. In exchange, the men expected the ex-senator — who then helmed the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to exert his influence to benefit their business interests and derail various criminal probes and prosecutions.
Nadine Menendez and businessman Jose Uribe were also charged in the scheme. But Uribe pleaded guilty in a cooperation deal and Stein ordered a separate trial, now set to start Feb. 5, for Nadine Menendez to accommodate her treatment for breast cancer.
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