Two Russian nationals pleaded guilty to their roles in ransomware attacks in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Africa for a notorious hacking gang known as LockBit.
Ruslan Magomedovich Astamirov and Mikhail Vasiliev admitted they helped to deploy the ransomware variant, which first appeared in 2020. It soon became one of the most destructive in the world, leading to attacks against more than 2,500 victims and ransom payments of at least $500 million, according to the Justice Department.
The men pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, where six people have been charged over LockBit attacks, including Dimitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, described by the US as the creator, developer and administrator of the group. US authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for his arrest.
Astamirov, 21, of the Chechen Republic, and Vasiliev, 34, of Bradford, Ontario, pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse.
LockBit is the name of a ransomware variant, a type of malicious code that locks up computers before hackers demand a ransom to unlock them. Hacking gangs are often known by the name of their ransomware variant. LockBit successfully deployed a ransomware-as-a-service model, in which “affiliates” lease the malicious code and do the actual hacking, in exchange for paying the the gang’s leaders a cut of their illegal proceeds. Astamirov and Vasiliev were affiliates, according to the Justice Department.
In recent years, the US and its allies have aggressively tried to curb ransomware attacks by sanctioning hackers or entities associated with them or disrupting the online infrastructure of cybercriminal gangs. But many hackers are located in places such as Russia, which provide them safe haven, making it difficult for Western law enforcement to arrest them.
In February, US and UK authorities announced they disrupted LockBit operations, arresting alleged members, seizing servers and cryptocurrency accounts, and recovering decryption keys to unlock hijacked data.
“We’ve dealt significant blows to destructive ransomware groups like LockBit, as we did earlier this year, seizing control of LockBit infrastructure and distributing decryption keys to their victims,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, in a statement.
Vasiliev deployed LockBit against at least 12 victims, including an educational facility in the UK and a school in Switzerland, the US said. He was arrested by Canadian authorities in November 2022 and extradited to the US in June.
Astamirov was arrested by the FBI last year. In May 2023, he agreed to an interview with FBI agents in Arizona, where they seized his electronic devices. He initially denied having anything to do with an email account through a Russian-based provider, but agents later found records related to it on his devices, according to the arrest complaint. Records showed that Astamirov used the email to “create multiple online accounts under names either fully or nearly identical to his own name,” the complaint said.
After August 2020, Astamirov executed cyberattacks on at least five victims, according to the FBI complaint. They included: businesses in France and West Palm Beach, Florida; a Tokyo firm, which refused to pay a ransom, leading the group to post stolen data on a “leak site” of extortion victims; a Virginia company that stopped an attack after 24,000 documents were stolen; and a Kenyan business that agreed to pay ransom after some of its stolen data was posted to the LockBit website.
Both are scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 8, 2025.
Recommended Newsletter:
CEO Daily provides key context for the news leaders need to know from across the world of business. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights about–and from inside–the C-suite. Subscribe Now.
Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was convicted Tuesday on all counts in a federal bribery trial that involved three New Jersey businessmen and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
He was also accused of disrupting criminal investigations by the New Jersey attorney general’s office into former insurance broker Jose Uribe, who pleaded guilty to trying to bribe Menendez by buying his wife, Nadine Menendez, a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Finally, prosecutors alleged, Menendez sought to conceal some of the bribe payments by characterizing them as loans.
Menendez said he was “deeply disappointed” by the verdict and plans to appeal.
Here is a look at each of the charges in the case:
Count 1: Conspiracy to commit bribery
This offense is related to the Egypt part of the scheme, as well as the federal bank fraud prosecution of Daibes and the Qatar elements.
Menendez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit bribery. Hana and Daibes were found guilty.
Count 2: Conspiracy to commit honest services fraud
The count involves every element of the alleged corruption scheme — Egypt, interference in the criminal cases and Qatar.
Menendez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud. Hana and Daibes were found guilty.
Count 3: Conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right
It also relates to the entire scheme.
Menendez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. Hana and Daibes were not charged with this offense.
Count 4: Conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice
The count involves Menendez’s alleged efforts to disrupt a federal bank fraud case against Daibes.
Menendez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice. Daibes was found guilty. Hana was not charged with this offense.
Count 5: Bribery
The charge alleges Menendez received bribes from Hana and Daibes in exchange for taking actions to benefit Hana’s halal certification monopoly and Egypt, including pressuring a Department of Agriculture official and promising to approve military aid to Egypt.
Menendez was found guilty of bribery. Hana and Daibes were charged under a separate count.
Count 6: Bribery
It alleges Hana and Daibes offered and gave bribes to Menendez and his wife, including cash, gold bars, mortgage payments to save Nadine Menendez’s home from foreclosure and a “low-or-no-show” job that paid her tens of thousands of dollars.
Hana and Daibes were found guiltyof bribery. Menendez was not included in this count.
Count 7: Honest services wire fraud
The charge is connected to actions Menendez took to allegedly benefit Hana and Egypt while receiving things of value from Hana and Daibes.
Menendez was found guilty of honest services wire fraud. Hana and Daibes were found guilty.
Count 8: Extortion under color of official right
The charge is also connected to actions Menendez took to allegedly benefit Hana and Egypt while receiving things of value from Hana and Daibes.
Menendez was found guilty of extortion under color of official right. Hana and Daibes were not charged.
Count 9: Honest services wire fraud
It relates to Menendez’s alleged promise to disrupt the New Jersey attorney general’s prosecution and investigation of Uribe’s business associatesin exchange for a Mercedes.
Menendez was found guiltyof honest services wire fraud. Hana was found guilty. Daibes was not included.
Count 10: Extortion under color of official right
The charge relates to Menendez’s alleged attempts to interfere in criminal cases involving Uribe’s business associates in exchange for a Mercedes.
Menendez was found guiltyof extortion under color of official right. Hana and Daibes were not charged.
Count 11: Bribery
The charge alleges Daibes gave Menendez and his wife gold bars and thousands of dollars in cash. In return, Menendez allegedly tried to use his influence to nominate a federal prosecutor who he thought could make a bank fraud case against Daibes go away. Menendez also made public statements in support of Qatar and introduced Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family who invested in his real estate project.
Menendez was found guilty of bribery. Daibes was charged in a separate count. Hana was not included.
Count 12: Bribery
This charge includes the same allegations as the previous count.
Daibes was found guilty of bribery. Menendez was charged in a separate count. Hana was not included.
Count 13: Honest services wire fraud
The charge involves Menendez’s actions that allegedly benefited Daibes and Qatar.
Menendez was found guilty of honest services wire fraud. Daibes was found guilty. Hana was not included on this count.
Count 14: Extortion under color of official right
The charge also relates Menendez’s actions that allegedly benefited Daibes and Qatar.
Menendez was found guilty of extortion under color of official right. Hana and Daibes were not charged.
Count 15: Conspiracy for a public official to act as a foreign agent
This count relates to Menendez’s actions toward Egypt, including ghostwriting a letter on behalf of Egypt to lobby his Senate colleagues to release aid to the country and providing it with details about U.S. Embassy employees in Cairo.
Menendez was found guilty of conspiracy for a public official to act as a foreign agent. Hana was found guilty. Daibes was not charged with this offense.
Count 16: Public official acting as a foreign agent
This count also stems from Menendez’s actions toward Egypt.
Menendez was found guilty of acting as a foreign agent while being a public official. Hana and Daibes, who are not public officials, were not indicted on this offense.
Count 17: Conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice
The count relates to Menendez writing his wife checks to pay back Hana for $23,000 in mortgage payments and $21,000 to Uribe for car payments after they learned they were under investigation.
Menendez was found guiltyof conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.Hana and Daibes were not included on this count.
Count 18: Obstruction of justice
The chargeisalso based on the checks Menendez wrote to his wife to pay back Hana and Uribe.
Menendez was found guilty of obstruction of justice. Hana and Daibes were not charged with this count.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
A jury that began deliberations on Friday with three hours of work is scheduled to resume in the morning in Manhattan federal court. The corruption trial for the New Jersey Democrat is entering its 10th week.
Menendez, 70, has denied charges that he engaged in a bribery scheme from 2018 to 2023 to benefit three New Jersey businessman, including by serving as a foreign agent for the government of Egypt.
He and two businessmen who allegedly paid him bribes of gold and cash have pleaded not guilty.
As he left court on Friday, Menendez told reporters, “I have faith in God and in the jury.”
Last week, lawyers spent more than 15 hours delivering closing arguments as they encouraged the jury to carefully review hundreds of exhibits and hours of testimony.
Prosecutors put a heavy emphasis in their closing arguments on nearly $150,000 of gold bars and over $480,000 in cash seized from the Menendez home during a 2022 FBI raid. They say the valuables were bribe proceeds.
They also insisted there were multiple ways in which Menendez seemed to serve as an agent of Egypt.
Lawyers for Menendez insisted the three-term senator never accepted bribes and actions he took to benefit the businessmen were the kinds of tasks expected of a public official.
They said his actions to help speed $99 million in military shipments of helicopter ammunition to Egypt, while other communications he carried out with Egyptian officials were also part of his job as a senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position he was forced to relinquish after charges were announced last fall.
Menendez announced several weeks ago that he plans to run for reelection this year as an independent.
Washington — The fate of Sen. Bob Menendez now lies in the hands of twelve jurors, who began deliberations Friday afternoon in the New Jersey Democrat’s bribery trial.
The trial, initially expected to last six weeks, has stretched into its ninth week.
Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty, is charged with 16 felony counts, including obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent, bribery, extortion and honest services wire fraud. He is accused of using his political influence to benefit two foreign governments, while helping three New Jersey businessmen in return for bribes that included stacks of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Since mid-May, prosecutors have detailed a wide-ranging corruption scheme in which Menendez allegedly used his influence as the then-chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee to secretly benefit Egypt and pressure a Department of Agriculture official to protect a halal certification monopoly Egypt granted to businessman Wael Hana, who was paying the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez.
The senator also allegedly tried to quash state and federal criminal cases related to former insurance broker Jose Uribe and real estate developer Fred Daibes. Menendez was helping Daibes land a lucrative investment deal with Qatar at the same time, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say Menendez and his wife tried to obstruct the investigation after they were initially charged by characterizing some of the alleged bribe payments as loans, which “caused” their former lawyers to make false statements to prosecutors.
A judge postponed Nadine Menendez’s trial until August because she’s recovering from breast cancer surgery. She has pleaded not guilty.
Hana and Daibes, who have also pleaded not guilty, are on trial with the senator.
Uribe pleaded guilty earlier this year and testified in this trial that he asked Menendez directly for his help, months after he said he handed Nadine Menendez $15,000 in cash in a restaurant parking lot for a downpayment on a $60,000 Mercedes. Uribe made her car payments until June 2022 — the same month the FBI searched the Menendezes’ home and found over $480,000 in cash and gold bars worth more than $100,000.
“This is a big case, but it all boils down to a classic case of corruption on a massive scale,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni said this week during closing arguments.
The senator chose not to testify in his own defense. His lawyers have asserted the government is prosecuting routine legislative activity. They also have tried to pin the blame on Nadine Menendez, saying she had financial troubles that she did not disclose to her husband.
“There is no text, there is no email, there is no recording, there is no voicemail, there is no photo, that ever shows Senator Menendez taking a bribe in exchange for doing something. There is none,” his lawyer Adam Fee said this week, saying the government’s case is based on “painfully thin” evidence.
Fee asked jurors to “resist the temptation to pick the salacious story about a corrupt politician, because it’s not there.”
Prosecutors pushed back on the defense’s assertion that the couple lived separate lives, showing jurors text messages of the couple sharing mundane details about their day with each other and the senator checking in on his wife’s location. They said Menendez was careful while committing the alleged crimes.
“When a sophisticated, careful person like Menendez commits a crime, he doesn’t say the quiet part out loud,” Monteleoni said. “He doesn’t negotiate the bribe payment himself. He has Nadine do that for him. He insulates himself.”
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
A lawyer for Sen. Bob Menendez urged jurors on Tuesday to acquit him of every charge at the New Jersey Democrat’s corruption trial, saying federal prosecutors had failed to prove a single count beyond a reasonable doubt.
The attorney, Adam Fee, told the Manhattan federal court jury that there were too many gaps in evidence that prosecutors wanted jurors to fill in on their own to conclude crimes were committed or that Menendez accepted any bribes.
“The absence of evidence should be held against the prosecution,” he said. “There’s zero evidence of him saying or suggesting that he was doing something for a bribe.”
And he defended over $100,000 in gold bars and more than $480,000 in cash found in an Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home during a June 2022 FBI search, although he acknowledged of the valuables: “It’s provocative. It’s atypical.”
“Prosecutors have not come close to meeting their burden to show you that any of the gold or cash was given to Senator Menendez as a bribe,” Fee said.
Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, arrives at federal court in New York City on July 8, 2024.
Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“This is a case with a lot of inferences,” he said, suggesting there were large gaps in the evidence that was unsupported by emails, texts or other evidence.
The longtime lawmaker faces 16 felony counts, including obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent, bribery, extortion and honest services wire fraud.
After the jury was sent home Tuesday, Fee told Judge Sidney Stein that he was about halfway through a five-hour closing that will resume Wednesday morning. His closing will be followed by arguments from two other defense lawyers before prosecutors present a rebuttal argument. The jury is likely to get the case on Thursday.
Earlier Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni said in a closing argument that began Monday that the senator had engaged in “wildly abnormal” behavior in response to bribes, including trying to interfere in criminal cases handled by the top state and federal prosecutors in New Jersey.
Menendez has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted bribes including gold and envelopes of cash from 2018 to 2022 from three New Jersey businessmen who wanted his help in their business ventures.
His trial entered its ninth week on Monday.
Menendez is on trial with two of the businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. Hana, who prosecutors say enlisted Menendez to help him protect a monopoly on the certification of meat exported from the U.S. to Egypt, and Daibes, an influential real estate developer, have also both pleaded not guilty. A third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified that he bought a Mercedes-Benz convertible for the senator’s wife in exchange for Menendez quashing criminal investigations into his business associates.
Wael Hana arrives for trial at Manhattan Federal Court on June 11, 2024, in New York City.
Michael M Santiago/Getty Images / Getty Images
Monteleoni rejected attempts by the defense to make it seem that Menendez was unaware of efforts to get cash or favors from the businessmen by his then-girlfriend, Nadine Arslanian, who became his wife in October 2020. Fee has argued that she went to great lengths to hide her financial troubles, including an inability to pay for her home, from Menendez.
To demonstrate his point that Menendez was in charge of bribery schemes, the prosecutor pointed to testimony about a small bell the senator allegedly used to summon his wife one day when he was outside their home with Uribe and wanted her to bring him paper.
The bell “showed you he was the one in charge,” Monteleoni said, “not a puppet having his strings pulled by someone he summons with a bell.”
Menendez has resisted calls, even by some prominent Democrats, that he resign, though he did relinquish his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the charges were unveiled last fall.
Washington — Attorneys for Sen. Bob Menendez concluded calling witnesses on Wednesday, opting not to have the New Jersey Democrat take the stand in his own defense as he fights allegations that he traded political favors for gold bars and cash.
While leaving court, Menendez said it did not make “any sense” for him to testify. “From my perspective, the government has failed to prove every aspect of its case,” he said.
A handful of witnesses testified on his behalf, compared to the 30 witnesses called by the prosecution during the trial, which has so far spanned eight weeks.
Menendez’s defense attorneys called his sister and the sister of his wife, Nadine Menendez, to testify on Monday as they sought to show it was not unusual for the couple to keep gold and large amounts of cash in their home.
When federal investigators executed a search warrant at Menendez’s home in June 2022, they found more than $480,000 in cash stashed in envelopes, coats, shoes and bags, as well as 13 gold bars worth more than $100,000.
Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty, is charged with bribery, extortion, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. Nadine Menendez has also pleaded not guilty. Her trial was postponed until August as she recovers from breast cancer surgery.
The senator’s older sister, Caridad Gonzalez, told jurors that their parents and aunt had a practice of storing cash at home after their family fled persecution in Cuba in 1951, before Menendez was born. She called the habit “a Cuban thing.”
“Daddy always said don’t trust the banks,” Gonzalez said. “If you trust the banks, you never know what can happen, so you must always have money at home.”
Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, exits federal court in New York on June 10, 2024.
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
She recalled finding a stash of cash in a shoebox in Menendez’s home in the 1980s.
But prosecutors undercut one of the points made by Gonzalez after she testified that she asked her brother to help a neighbor with an immigration issue. Prosecutors showed text messages between the senator and his sister that suggest he did not give that issue the same treatment that prosecutors say the businessmen who bribed the couple got.
The businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, are on trial with the senator. They have also pleaded not guilty.
When they asked Menendez for help, he allegedly pressured a U.S. Department of Agriculture official to protect Hana’s halal certification monopoly and interfered in a criminal case in New Jersey involving Daibes, according to prosecutors.
Russell Richardson, a forensic accountant, testified that Menendez withdrew about $400 in cash almost every few weeks from 2008 to 2022, totaling more than $150,000.
The testimony was meant to bolster Menendez’s explanation that he withdrew thousands of dollars in cash from his bank account over decades because of his family’s experience in Cuba.
Richardson testified during cross-examination that he did not find any record of Menendez withdrawing $10,000 in cash at one time. Some of the cash seized from Menendez’s home was found in bundles of $10,000, and Daibes’ fingerprints were found on some of the envelopes containing the cash.
Part of Menendez’s defense strategy has been to pin the blame on his wife, claiming the senator was unaware of his wife’s financial challenges and her dealings with the businessmen accused of bribing them.
Nadine Menendez’s younger sister, Katia Tabourian, testified that her sister and the senator broke up in late 2018 because her sister’s ex-boyfriend “was creating a lot of chaos in her relationship with the senator.” Menendez’s lawyers say the couple could not have plotted together during the pause in their relationship.
Tabourian confirmed that her sister locked her bedroom closet, which Menendez’s lawyers said he did not have a key to. Investigators found gold bars and cash in the closet during the 2022 search. Tabourian said it was common for her family to give cash, gold and jewelry as gifts.
Jurors are expected to have the case by the end of next week, following testimony from Hana’s witnesses and closing arguments. Daibes’ legal team rested Wednesday without presenting a defense.
—Ash Kalmar and Christine Sloan contributed reporting.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Malaysian court on Wednesday dismissed a bid by imprisoned former Prime Minister Najib Razak to serve his remaining corruption sentence under house arrest.
In an April application, Najib said he had clear information that then-King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah issued an addendum order allowing him to finish his sentence under house arrest. Najib claimed the addendum was issued during a Jan. 29 pardons board meeting chaired by Sultan Abdullah, which also cut his 12-year jail sentence by half and sharply reduced a fine.
Najib’s counsel, Mohamed Shafee Abdullah, said it was disappointing for the High Court to rule Wednesday that the government has “no legal duty” to verify if such an order existed. He said they would file an appeal.
“The court said there is no legal duty but in terms of ethics, the government should have answered,” Shafee told a news conference at the court building.
In his application, Najib has accused the pardons board, home minister, attorney-general and four others of concealing the sultan’s order “in bad faith.” Sultan Abdullah hails from Najib’s hometown in Pahang. He ended his five-year reign on Jan. 30 under Malaysia’s unique rotating monarchy system. A new king took office Jan. 31.
Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said he had no knowledge of such an order as he wasn’t a member of the pardons board. The others named in Najib’s application have not made any public comments.
Shafee said Najib’s application was not based on hearsay but that there was “digital evidence” of the addendum as Trade Minister Zafrul Aziz had taken a snapshot of it on his mobile phone when told by Sultan Abdullah. He said the government’s silence also implied there is such an addendum order.
“One thing is clear, not one person or any government institutions have said that this addendum doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, just say so. … If the government dare says clearly there is no addendum, we can all go home and sleep,” he said.
Najib, 70, served less than two years of his sentence before it was commuted by the pardons board. His sentence is now due to end Aug. 23, 2028. He was charged and found guilty in a corruption case linked to the multibillion-dollar looting of state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad.
The pardons board didn’t give any reason for its decision and wasn’t required to explain. But the move has prompted a public outcry on why Najib appeared to be given special privileges compared to other prisoners.
The Malaysian Bar, which represents over 20,000 lawyers, filed an application to challenge the pardons board decision that it said was illegal, unconstitutional and invalid. It said the decision made a mockery of Najib’s other ongoing criminal cases. The hearing for the Bar’s challenge started this week.
Najib set up the 1MDB development fund shortly after he took office in 2009. Investigators allege at least $4.5 billion was stolen from the fund and laundered by Najib’s associates through layers of bank accounts in the United States and other countries, financed Hollywood films and extravagant purchases that included hotels, a luxury yacht, art and jewelry. More than $700 million landed in Najib’s bank accounts.
Washington — Prosecutors in Sen. Bob Menendez’s bribery trial rested their case against the New Jersey Democrat on Friday, bringing an end to seven weeks of testimony from more than two dozen witnesses they’ve called to persuade a jury that the senator used his political influence to benefit three businessmen and two foreign governments in exchange for bribes.
The allegations date back to 2018, around the time the Democratic senator began dating the woman who is now his wife, Nadine Menendez, whose trial was postponed as she recovers from breast cancer surgery.
Over the last month and a half, prosecutors detailed a wide-ranging corruption scheme in which Menendez allegedly used his influence as the then-chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee to secretly benefit Egypt; pressured a U.S. Department of Agriculture official to protect a halal certification monopoly Egypt granted to a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hana; interfered in a criminal investigations by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office into the associates of a second New Jersey businessman, Jose Uribe; and attempted to influence a federal prosecution of a third New Jersey businessman, Fred Daibes.
In return, prosecutors say, the businessmen provided Menendez and his wife with lavish gifts, including cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, furniture and mortgage payments as Nadine Menendez was facing foreclosure on her home.
Hana and Daibes are on trial with Menendez. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Businessman says Mercedes was bribe
Sen. Bob Menendez leaves Manhattan federal court on June 7, 2024, in New York.
Adam Gray / AP
Uribe, who pleaded guilty in March, was the prosecution’s star witness, telling jurors that he bribed the senator by buying his wife a luxury car for the purpose of disrupting two state criminal investigations into his business associates. Hana, a longtime friend of Nadine Menendez, indicated that the senator and his wife could “make these things go away,” according to Uribe.
The insurance broker testified that he asked the senator directly for his help during two meetings in August and September 2019, months after he said he handed Nadine Menendez $15,000 in cash in a restaurant parking lot for a downpayment on the Mercedes. Uribe made her car payments until June 2022 — the same month the FBI searched the Menendezes’ home and found over $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes, coats, shoes and bags, and 13 gold bars worth more than $100,000.
“I paid for the car as an arrangement with Nadine that I will provide a car, in return for her getting Mr. Menendez to use his power to stop [the investigations],” Uribe said earlier this month.
Gurbir Grewal, the then-attorney general for New Jersey,told jurors about a January 2019 call and September 2019 meeting in which Menendez raised a concern “about a pending criminal manner.”
“I can’t talk to you about this,” Grewal recalled telling Menendez.
After the September meeting with the state attorney general, Uribe said Menendez told him, “That thing that you asked me about, there’s nothing there. I give you your peace.” The senator later boasted about saving him twice, Uribe testified.
But Uribe’s credibility also came under fire during cross-examination by defense attorneys. He admitted to a long list of lies that have culminated in a number of criminal charges over the years.
An agent for Egypt?
Another piece central to the alleged scheme was a New Jersey startup owned by Hana, which prosecutors say was used to funnel bribe payments to the senator and his wife.
In April 2019, Egypt granted a lucrative monopoly to Hana’s halal certification company, setting off alarms at the Department of Agriculture. Before that, four companies had split ensuring that meat exported from the U.S. to Egypt was prepared according to Islamic law. The abrupt change confused U.S. officials because Hana’s company did not have any prior experience in halal certification and had few employees. The decision increased meat costs in Egypt and was seen as detrimental to U.S. businesses, according to several officials who testified.
The U.S. was stonewalled when it sought answers from Egypt, which officials said was unusual for the country — one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid.
“When the Americans request a meeting, we get meetings,” Bret Tate, a former agricultural attaché in Cairo, said.
As the U.S. continued to press Egypt, Ted McKinney, a former top agricultural official, said he got a call from Menendez with the message: “Stop interfering with my constituent.”
“I felt he was telling me to stand down and stop doing all of the things that we were doing to try to revive some sense of competition in the U.S. beef market,” McKinney told jurors in May. “It was the first time I’d ever had a call that we thought would clearly harm elements of the U.S. food and [agriculture] industry.”
Menendez’s lawyers challenged the characterization of the conversation, saying he was doing his job by helping a constituent.
By that time, prosecutors alleged, Menendez was doing favors for Egyptian officials that he knew through his wife and Hana, including secretly helping the country lobby his colleagues to release $300 million in aid that had been held up over human rights concerns and providing it with details about U.S. Embassy employees in Cairo, which prosecutors argued was sensitive information.
On May 21, 2019, soon after Egypt granted the monopoly, the FBI was surveilling an upscale steakhouse near the White House, waiting for their target who had come from New York to arrive, according to two FBI agents who testified.
Two agents, undercover as a husband and wife on a date, sat on the restaurant’s patio near a group that included an Egyptian official, Hana and his business associate. Then Menendez and his wife showed up. It’s unclear who the FBI’s target was, though an agent testified that the senator was not the intended subject of the surveillance. The undercover agents snapped photos and took silent footage with a concealed video camera.
One of the agent’s testified that she heard the senator’s wife ask the other group, “What else can the love of my life do for you?” The agent did not hear the response.
With the assistance of the senator, Nadine Menendez set up a shell company in summer 2019, which was used to receive payments from a “low-or-no-show job” at Hana’s company, according to prosecutors. At the time, she was tens of thousands of dollars behind on her mortgage and facing foreclosure. Hana wired her $23,000 to save her home from foreclosure and then put her on the company’s payroll for $10,000 a month, a former lawyer for the businessman’s company testified.
Sarah Arkin, a former senior aide to Menendez, testified this week about a number of incidents involving the senator and Egyptian officials that she considered to be unusual.
Arkin told jurors that Menendez held meetings with Egyptian officials that she had not been told of, a deviation from normal practice.
For one of the meetings she was aware of, she said the senator had handwritten the invitation for the Egyptian defense attaché in Washington and Hana to visit his office. The handwritten invite was “an unusual item,” she said. When the meeting happened in March 2018, Nadine Menendez, who had just begun dating the senator, was also there.
In September 2021, when Arkin was helping Menendez prepare for a congressional delegation trip to Egypt and Qatar, she said the senator instructed his staff to plan the visit with an Egyptian intelligence officer posted in the country’s embassy in Washington. The trips, she said, were normally planned by the State Department.
“All of this Egypt stuff is very weird. I’ve never seen anything like it,” another staffer texted Arkin as they planned the trip.
Menendez’s lawyers have portrayed his interactions with Egyptian officials as another part of his job as a member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez stepped down from his role as committee chair when he was indicted last fall.
Gold bars and Qatar
Prosecutors say Daibes, the third businessman indicted, bribed the couple with cash and gold bars in order for the senator to try to influence a federal bank fraud case against the real estate developer.
The case came up as Menendez was considering recommending his longtime friend, Philip Sellinger, to be U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
Sellinger, who now holds the job, said the senator told him he thought Daibes “was being treated unfairly” by the U.S. attorney’s office and “hoped that if I became U.S. attorney that I would look at it carefully.” Sellinger testified that he told the senator he may have to recuse himself from the case if appointed because of an unrelated lawsuit his law firm had handled related to Daibes.
Sellinger said their longtime friendship ended shortly after that and Menendez told him he would no longer nominate him for the role.
But Sellinger said he “never believed [Menendez] to be asking me to do anything unethical or improper,” and the senator did eventually recommend him for the position.
As Menendez was trying to help Daibes, he was researching the value of gold online, according to evidence introduced by the prosecution. An FBI agent testified that he reviewed records including the senator’s internet search history dating back to 2008. The senator’s first search about gold was in April 2019, the agent said. After that, he repeatedly researched the price of gold.
“One kilo gold bar,” one of those searches read.
The online searches also happened as the senator allegedly used his influence to help Daibes secure a $95 million investment from a Qatari investment fund by taking actions favorable to Qatar’s government.
Nearly a dozen envelopes of cash with tens of thousands of dollars bearing the fingerprints or DNA of Daibes were found in the Menendez home, according to expert testimony and evidence shown to jurors. Prosecutors have linked some of the gold found inside the senator’s home to Daibes and Hana through serial numbers.
But a New Jersey jeweler, who testified Wednesday about selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of gold for Nadine Menendez, said he did not record the serial numbers of the gold he sold for her. The jeweler recalled that she first asked him to sell two one-kilogram bars of gold in March 2022, which fetched nearly $60,000 each.
“She said she needed to pay the bills,” he recalled, adding that Nadine Menendez told him the gold was from her family. “She had expenses in, like, home bills.”
In May of that year, she asked him to sell four one-ounce gold coins worth $7,200 and another two one-kilogram gold bars, the jeweler said. They didn’t discuss where she got them from or why she wanted to sell them, he said. The requests came weeks before the FBI executed a search warrant at the Menendez home.
Jurors also heard this week from an FBI specialist about when some of the bills found among the nearly half a million dollars in cash stockpiled in the senator’s home were issued. Evidence showed hundreds of the bills entered circulation starting in 2018, when the alleged corruption scheme began. But defense attorneys said the newer bills made up only a fraction of the stash.
What happens next
Lawyers for Menendez, Hana and Daibes have said they could call more than a dozen witnesses, beginning Monday, but haven’t said whether any of the defendants will testify themselves.
The judge told jurors last week that he expects the case will be in their hands by the end of the week of July 8.
In their opening statement and during cross-examination over the last seven weeks, the senator’s attorneys have shifted the blame to his wife, which legal experts say could backfire with jurors.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
NEW YORK — Prosecutors at the bribery trial of Sen. Bob Menendez rested their case on Friday after presenting evidence for seven weeks, enabling the Democrat and two New Jersey businessmen to begin calling their own witnesses to support defense claims that no crimes were committed and no bribes were paid.
On their final day of direct questioning, prosecutors elicited details about the senator’s financial records by questioning an FBI forensic accountant. Judge Sidney H. Stein then dismissed jurors for the weekend. Defense attorneys are scheduled to begin presenting their case on Monday.
Prosecutors say gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in a raid of Menendez’s home two years ago were bribes paid by three businessmen from 2018 to 2022 in return for favors that the senator, using his political power, carried out on their behalf.
Defense lawyers claim the gold belonged to his wife and that Menendez had a habit of storing cash at home after his family lost almost everything in Cuba before they moved to New York, where Menendez was born.
“The government hasn’t proven its case,” the senator remarked as he left the courthouse Friday afternoon.
Menendez, 70, is on trial with two of the businessmen after a third pleaded guilty in a cooperation deal with the government and testified at the trial. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is also charged in the case, which was unveiled last fall. Her trial has been postponed while she recovers from breast cancer surgery. All defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Menendez’s lawyers are planning to spend up to three days presenting testimony from several witnesses to support their argument that Nadine Menendez, who was Nadine Arslanian when she began dating the senator in early 2018, kept him in the dark about her financial troubles. The couple married in the fall of 2020.
The defense also plans to introduce testimony to try to show that Arslanian was in close contact with the senator at the height of the alleged conspiracy in late 2018 and early 2019 because she was being harassed by an ex-boyfriend.
Stein ruled on Wednesday that defense lawyers can elicit testimony to counter evidence introduced by prosecutors that might otherwise be interpreted to suggest that Arslanian and the senator seemed to be closely following each other’s whereabouts because they were involved in the alleged conspiracy.
But he said he wouldn’t allow the jury to hear any evidence suggesting that she ended up in the hospital at one point as a result of an abusive relationship with an ex-boyfriend.
“This is not going to be ‘Days of Our Lives’ or some soap opera,” the judge warned lawyers.
MINNEAPOLIS — Five people have been indicted for their alleged roles in the $120,000 bribery attempt of a juror during the Feeding Our Future fraud trial earlier this month.
During the trial, a juror was dismissed after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic. The overall scheme is estimated to have diverted $250 million in federal funds in what officials call the “largest pandemic fraud in the United States.”
U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger called the bribery attempt a “chilling attack on our justice system,” and said it was fortunate that “juror 52 could not be bought.”
According to the justice department, the five defendants targeted the 23-year-old juror because she was the youngest, and because they believed her to be the only juror of color.
The five charged — Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Said Shafii Farah, Abdulkarim Shafii Farah and Ladan Mohamed Ali — found the juror’s information online, including her home address.
Luger said that Nur, who was one of the defendants in the Feeding Our Future trial, recruited Ali to carry out the scheme. Ali flew in from Seattle on May 30, and the next day followed the juror home from downtown Minneapolis after the first day of closing arguments.
Abdiaziz Farah instructed Nur to meet him at Said Farah’s business to pick up the $200,000 in bribe money. Nur then met with Ali and gave her the money, the justice department said.
On the evening of June 2, Abdulkarim Farah drove Ali to the juror’s house, where she handed a gift bag containing $120,000 in cash to the juror’s relative. She promised there would be more money if the juror voted to acquit all the defendants. Abdulkarim Farah took a video of Ali dropping off the money and sent it to his co-conspirators, officials say.
A woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at the home of a juror in the Feeding Our Future fraud trial.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
The conspirators had also drafted a list of instructions for the juror, Luger said. Her job would be to “convince all the remaining jurors to mark NOT GUILTY for all defendants and all counts.” They also compiled a list of “arguments to convince other jurors,” many of which were designed to convince the jurors that the prosecution was motivated by racism.
One of the conspirators “purchased a GPS tracking device to covertly install” on the juror’s car “in order to track her movements,” Luger’s department said.
Abdiaziz Farah wiped his phone after the judge ordered it to be surrendered to law enforcement. Nur and Said Farah also deleted evidence of the bribe on their phones, documents state.
Abdiaziz Farah and Nur were two of the five defendants who were found guilty during the trial. Said Farah was found not guilty.
There are still 45 more people expected to go on trial for the fraud scheme, including the founder of the nonprofit Aimee Bock, who has maintained her innocence. Defendants are accused of spending the money on luxury cars, jewelry, travel, and property, while just a fraction went to feed low-income children.
On Wednesday, Luger charged the five defendants with conspiracy to bribe a juror, bribery of a juror, and corruptly influencing a juror. Abdiaziz Farah was also charged with obstruction of justice.
Cole Premo is digital manager for CBS Minnesota. For more than a decade, he’s been covering breaking news and weather, daily topics, stories from the Native community and more in Minnesota.
Prosecutors on Thursday showed jurors at Sen. Bob Menendez’s trial multiple instances when he researched the value of gold as he tried to help a New Jersey businessman who authorities say bribed him with gold and cash.
The evidence about the New Jersey Democrat’s online searches was prominently displayed to a New York jury as prosecutors traced the history of his text messages and internet queries as he allegedly tried to aid Fred Daibes, a prominent real estate developer who is on trial with him.
The evidence is considered crucial in the government’s effort to prove that Menendez and his wife received gold bars, cash and a luxury car from 2018 to 2022 from three New Jersey businessmen who benefited from favors Menendez is alleged to have delivered in return.
Menendez, Daibes and another businessman and co-defendant, Wael Hana, have pleaded not guilty. His wife, Nadine Menendez, faces trial at a later date and is recovering from breast cancer surgery. She too has pleaded not guilty.
A third businessman pleaded guilty prior to trial and testified against the other defendants. The businessman, Jose Uribe, said he tried to bribe Menendez by paying for a Mercedes-Benz convertible for Nadine Menendez. In return, he said he wanted the senator to use his influence to stop criminal investigations into his business associates.
The gold bars found in the home Menendez shared with his wife in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, took a prominent role early in the trial when an FBI agent described a 2022 search of the residence the senator moved into in 2020.
The search found gold bars worth more than $100,000 and over $486,000 in cash, some stuffed in the pockets of coats hanging in closets, in bags and in shoes and boots. A Mercedes-Benz was parked in the garage.
On Thursday, the topic of gold came up repeatedly as another FBI agent described internet searches Menendez conducted when he researched the price of gold in April 2019, twice in May 2021, again in October 2021, twice in December 2021, once in January 2022 and again in March and May 2022.
Among the searches, agent Paul Van Wie said, were instances when Menendez researched the worth of a gram, an ounce and a kilo of gold. The agent said a search of Menendez’s internet history since 2008 showed that the senator had never searched for gold prices during that span until April 5, 2019.
Menendez’s lawyers have said gold bars found in the home belonged to his wife and that she kept the senator in the dark about gifts she accepted when she was in financial trouble.
Prosecutors sought to prove Thursday through emails, text messages and the online searches for the price of gold that Menendez was interested in gold as he allegedly sought to recommend a new federal prosecutor for New Jersey who could help Daibes get a favorable outcome in a criminal case against him.
The online searches also occurred as Menendez allegedly used his international clout to help Daibes secure a $95 million investment from a Qatari investment fund by taking actions favorable to Qatar’s government.
Daibes has been credited with the construction of a string of luxury waterfront buildings, known as the “gold coast,” in the New Jersey town of Edgewater.
Prosecutors showed the jury email and text correspondence Thursday reflecting that Menendez introduced Daibes to a member of Qatar’s royal family who was a principal in the investment firm and also met with Qatari officials and made public statements supportive of Qatar as the real estate deal was being negotiated.
After the deal was signed in May 2022, Daibes gave Menendez at least one gold bar, prosecutors say.
In the 2022 search of the Menendez home, FBI agents found two one-kilogram gold bars and nine one-ounce gold bars with serial numbers showing they had previously been possessed by Daibes, along with about nearly a dozen envelopes of cash with tens of thousands of dollars bearing the fingerprints or DNA of Daibes, according to the evidence shown to jurors.
One of the one-kilogram gold bars was found inside a Ziploc bag that had been wrapped in a paper towel, an FBI agent testified at the beginning of the trial. In the same closet, the FBI discovered a safe containing loose cash, envelopes of cash, seven one-ounce gold bars and another one-kilogram gold bar, the agent said.
Menendez’s lawyers say the closet, which was locked, was his wife’s and he did not have a key to it.
In August 2021, according to evidence shown to the jury Thursday, Menendez used an encrypted messaging application to send Daibes the text of a press release in which he praised the government of Qatar, before texting Daibes: “You might want to send to them. I am just about to release.”
When Menendez was charged last fall, he held the powerful post of chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position he relinquished after he was charged. He has resisted calls, including from prominent Democrats, that he resign from the Senate and he recently announced that he’s running for reelection as an independent.
Prosecutors at the trial of Sen. Bob Menendez used the testimony of his former campaign manager on Tuesday to try to link alleged bribes of the Democrat to the appointment of New Jersey’s top prosecutor three years ago.
Michael Soliman, a former top Menendez political adviser, testified immediately after New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, Philip Sellinger, finished two days on the witness stand at the Manhattan federal court trial that is in its sixth week.
Menendez and two New Jersey businessmen are on trial on charges alleging the senator accepted gold bars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a luxury car from businessmen from 2018 to 2022 in return for helping them in their business dealings, including by trying to meddle in court cases.
Sellinger testified last week that Menendez told him that if he recommended that he be appointed as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, he hoped he’d take a look at a criminal case against Fred Daibes, a prominent New Jersey real estate developer, because he believed he “was being treated unfairly.”
Sellinger said he told Menendez the next day that he would have to notify the Justice Department that he might need to be recused from the Daibes case because he had worked on a lawsuit while in private practice that was adverse to Daibes.
Menendez then recommended somebody else for the job, and Soliman testified Tuesday that he was told by a top Menendez aide in December 2020 that the senator and Sellinger “had a falling out.”
Soliman said that after the appointment of the new candidate fell through following a series of negative news articles about her, Sellinger told him that he wanted the senator to know that he checked with the Justice Department and learned that “the issue” that he thought would require his recusal did not after all.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal asked Soliman if there was any confusion expressed by Menendez about what “the issue” was when he relayed the conversation to the senator.
“No,” Soliman said.
Soliman, who said he did not know what “the issue” was that Sellinger had referenced, also said Menendez did not ask any questions regarding the message Sellinger passed along.
Sellinger, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, was sworn in as U.S. attorney in December 2021 and has held the post ever since.
Sellinger, testifying last week, recalled his conversation with Soliman differently, claiming that he told Soliman exactly what he told the senator: that he expected he might be recused from the Daibes case because of the civil case he had worked on that was adverse to Daibes.
Sellinger said he called Menendez in spring 2022 to invite him to speak at a public ceremony celebrating Sellinger’s appointment as U.S. attorney.
“He said: ‘I’m going to pass,’” Sellinger recalled.
Sellinger said the senator then said: “The only thing worse than not having a relationship with the United States attorney is people thinking you have a relationship with the United States attorney and you don’t.”
Sellinger testified on cross-examination last week and Tuesday in ways favorable to the senator, including saying he never believed Menendez had asked him to do anything improper or unethical.
Buoyed by Sellinger’s testimony on cross-examination, Menendez left the courthouse Tuesday seeming upbeat, saying just before getting in his car: “Sellinger made it very clear. He was asked to do nothing wrong. And he didn’t.”
Daibes, who is on trial with Menendez, contracted COVID last week, forcing a three-day delay in a trial that is now expected to stretch into July. After Wednesday’s holiday, the trial resumes Thursday.
Washington — A New Jersey businessman who says he bribed Sen. Bob Menendez by buying his wife a Mercedes-Benz convertible for the purpose of disrupting two criminal investigations will continue to be cross-examined Tuesday in the Democrat’s corruption trial.
Over two days, Jose Uribe, an insurance broker who is the prosecution’s star witness, has detailed how he says he bribed the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, in order to stop criminal investigations by the New Jersey attorney general into his business associates.
Uribe is the only defendant to plead guilty in the case. The others, including the senator and his wife, have pleaded not guilty. Menendez is being tried alongside Wael Hana, the owner of a halal certification company, and Fred Daibes, a real estate developer — both are also accused of bribing the senator.
Uribe testified Monday that he asked the senator directly for his help with quashing the investigations during two meetings in August and September 2019.
The first meeting allegedly came months after he said he met Nadine Menendez in a restaurant parking lot, where he claims he handed her $15,000 in cash for the down payment on a luxury convertible. After that, he made monthly payments on the vehicle and sought to conceal his involvement in them, Uribe told jurors.
“I remember saying to her, ‘If your problem is a car, my problem is saving my family, and we went into the agreement of helping each other,’” Uribe said.
During a dinner in August 2019 with the senator and his wife, the investigations were discussed, Uribe testified. An employee who Uribe considered family was under investigation and a business associate had been charged with insurance fraud. The business associate ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.
“He would look into it,” Uribe said of Bob Menendez’s response after he asked him to “stop this investigation.” “I asked him to help me get peace for me and my family.”
The second meeting, Uribe said, happened over brandy and cigars in Nadine Menendez’s backyard on Sept. 5, 2019.
The two men were alone when Bob Menendez told Uribe he had a meeting the next day at his Newark office with the New Jersey attorney general, according to Uribe.
The senator, he said, rang a little bell sitting on the table and called for his wife using the French word for “my love.” She brought out a piece of paper and returned inside, Uribe testified. Bob Menendez asked him to write down the names of the people he was concerned about, Uribe said, recalling that the senator then folded the piece of paper and put it in his pants pocket.
Uribe said he and Bob Menendez didn’t discuss the car payments during their conversations. He assumed the senator had known about the payments and he was never told by Nadine Menendez not to keep it a secret.
The day after Bob Menendez met with New Jersey’s attorney general, Nadine Menendez asked Uribe to meet the senator at his apartment building. The senator told him there was “no indication of an investigation against my family,” Uribe testified.
Uribe said he received a call from the senator on Oct. 29, 2019, when he said Menendez told him: “That thing that you asked me about, there’s nothing there. I give you your peace.”
Nearly a year later, the two men were at dinner when Bob Menendez told him, “I saved your a** twice. Not once but twice,” Uribe testified.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
Washington — A star witness who testified about bribing New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will be back on the stand Monday.
Jose Uribe, a New Jersey insurance broker, told jurors last week that he bought the Democratic senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, a new Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s “power and influence” to stop criminal investigations into his business associates.
Uribe pleaded guilty in March and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the case against Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty and has denied accepting any bribes.
In 2018, Uribe was desperate to help a business associate who was charged with insurance fraud and an employee who was under investigation.
“I was f****d,” Uribe said Friday.
Uribe testified that his friend, Wael Hana, who is on trial with Menendez, told him he had “a way to make these things go away” for $200,000 to $250,000, and mentioned the Menendezes.
“What did he say about them?” prosecutor Lara Pomerantz asked.
“He could go to Nadine,” Uribe said. “Nadine will work with — go to Senator Menendez.”
Prosecutors allege Menendez called New Jersey state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to try to disrupt the insurance fraud case in January 2019. The alleged interference didn’t work, however, and Uribe’s business associate eventually pleaded guilty. But the investigation into Uribe’s employee, whom he considers to be a daughter, continued.
Uribe said he repeatedly messaged Hana for reassurance that the issue would be resolved favorably by the senator, but he was losing hope that Hana was following through on his part. So, he approached Nadine Menendez himself in March 2019 with an offer: “I will provide the car as long as she helps me,” he said.
Nadine Menendez was in need of a car after a December 2018 crash and had complained to Hana about her lack of a vehicle.
Uribe and Nadine Menendez agreed that he would buy her a car and the senator, whom she would marry the next year, would try to make the investigation go away, he told jurors.
Menendez is being tried alongside Hana, the owner of a halal certification company, and Fred Daibes, a real estate developer. Hana and Daibes, who are accused of trying to bribe the senator, have also pleaded not guilty.
The judge postponed Nadine Menendez’s trial until later this summer because she is being treated for breast cancer. She has also pleaded not guilty.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
Washington — A key witness in the corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez is expected to testify Friday about what he says was an attempt to bribe the New Jersey Democrat by buying his wife, Nadine Menendez, a new Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Jose Uribe, a New Jersey insurance broker who was indicted with Menendez, pleaded guilty in March and confessed to buying a $60,000 luxury car to influence the senator. He is cooperating with prosecutors.
During the March hearing, Uribe said he conspired with the senator’s wife and others to buy her the car in exchange for her husband “using his power and influence as a United States senator to get a favorable outcome and to stop all investigations related to one of my associates,” according to the Associated Press.
He also told the judge he wanted to stop a “possible investigation into another person who I considered to be a member of my family,” adding that he concealed his involvement in the car payments “because I knew it was wrong.”
Throughout the senator’s corruption trial, which is in its fourth week, prosecutors have used text messages, emails, voice mails and financial records to portray the senator and his wife as collaborators in a complex bribery scheme that involved a halal meat monopoly, the Egyptian and Qatari governments and trying to influence several criminal investigations.
The senator is being tried alongside two New Jersey businessmen — Wael Hana, the owner of a halal certification startup, and Fred Daibes, a real estate developer. All three have pleaded not guilty. Nadine Menendez’s trial was delayed until later this summer as she undergoes treatment for breast cancer. She has pleaded not guilty.
Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, center, exits federal court in New York on Wednesday, June 5, 2024.
Alex Kent/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Hana connected Uribe to the couple after Nadine Menendez was involved in a car crash that killed a pedestrian in December 2018. Nadine Menendez, who was not charged in the death, had been complaining to Hana about her lack of a car after the crash, according to text messages presented by prosecutors as evidence.
Meanwhile, Uribe was desperate to help a business associate who was charged with insurance fraud and an employee who was under investigation, according to prosecutors.
In January 2019, prosecutors say, the senator called New Jersey’s attorney general to try to disrupt the insurance fraud case. The alleged interference didn’t work, however, and Uribe’s business associate eventually pleaded guilty. But the investigation into Uribe’s employee, who he said he considered to be a family member, continued.
Uribe and Nadine Menendez came to an agreement that he would buy her the car she needed and the senator, whom she would marry the next year, would try to make the investigation go away, prosecutors say.
Nadine Menendez had her new car by early April 2019, after meeting Uribe in a restaurant parking lot where he gave her $15,000 in cash for a down payment, according to the indictments.
“Congratulations mon amour de la vie we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” she allegedly texted the senator.
Uribe later arranged car payments, texting an associate, “I don’t want to use anything with my name on it,” according to messages prosecutors showed jurors.
After the FBI searched their home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in June 2022, whereagentsdiscovered stacks of cash, gold bars and the Mercedes, Nadine Menendez and Uribe met to discuss what he would say if asked about the car payments, according to what he told the court when he pleaded guilty.
“I told her that I would say a good friend of mine was in a financial situation and I was helping that friend to make the payments on the car, and when she was financially stable, she will pay me back. Nadine says something like, ‘That sounds good,’” Uribe told the judge in March, according to the AP.
Prosecutors say the senator then wrote a check to his wife, who then wrote one to Uribe, characterizing it as a loan. That characterization was a lie, an attempt to hide the earlier bribe, prosecutors said.
Menendez’s attorneys have tried to shift any blame to his wife, arguing they lived separate lives and he was largely in the dark about her dealings with the three businessmen accused of bribing them.
“She kept Bob sidelined from those conversations,” his attorney Avi Weitzman said.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
NEW YORK — Jury selection was scheduled to start Monday in the trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat charged with accepting bribes of gold and cash to use his influence to deliver favors that would aid three New Jersey businessmen.
Menendez, 70, will stand trial in Manhattan federal court along with two of the businessmen — real estate developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. All three have pleaded not guilty. A third businessman has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the other defendants. The senator’s wife is also charged, but her trial is delayed until at least July.
Opening statements were possible, but unlikely, before Tuesday for a trial that has already sent the senator’s political stature tumbling. After charges were announced in September, he was forced out of his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The three-term senator has announced he will not be seeking reelection on the Democratic ticket this fall, although he has not ruled out running as an independent.
It will be the second corruption trial for Menendez this decade. The previous prosecution on unrelated charges ended with a deadlocked jury in 2017.
In the new case, prosecutors say the senator’s efforts on behalf of the businessmen led him to take actions benefitting the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Menendez has vigorously denied doing anything unusual in his dealings with foreign officials.
Besides charges including bribery, extortion, fraud and obstruction of justice, Menendez also is charged with acting as a foreign agent of Egypt.
Among evidence his lawyers will have to explain are gold bars worth over $100,000 and more than $486,000 in cash found in a raid two years ago on his New Jersey home, including money stuffed in the pockets of clothing in closets.
The Democrat’s wife, Nadine Menendez, was also charged in the case, but her trial has been postponed for health reasons. She is still expected to be a major figure. Prosecutors say that Nadine Menendez often served as a conduit between the men paying the bribes and Menendez.
The senator’s lawyers in court papers have said they plan to explain that Menendez had no knowledge of some of what occurred because she kept him in the dark.
According to an indictment, Daibes delivered gold bars and cash to Menendez and his wife to get the senator’s help with a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund, prompting Menendez to act in ways favorable to Qatar’s government.
The indictment also said Menendez did things benefitting Egyptian officials in exchange for bribes from Hana as the businessman secured a valuable deal with the Egyptian government to certify that imported meat met Islamic dietary requirements.
In pleading guilty several weeks ago, businessman Jose Uribe admitted buying Menendez’s wife a Mercedes-Benz to get the senator’s help to influence criminal investigations involving his business associates.
Donald Trump began his trial in Manhattan this week in the case regarding his hush money payments to cover up his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, marking the first time a former American president has faced a criminal trial. What do you think?
“Can we go one day without our republic being tested?”
Jim Bevel, Paramedic
Updated Texas Sex Ed Curriculum Instructs Children How To Stone Whores
“What better way to connect with voters than through a jury pool?”
Lester Farooq, Anxiety Specialist
“I feel like the ‘hush money’ didn’t do its job here.”
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A supervisor who managed security at a South Carolina prison accepted more than $219,000 in bribes over three years and got 173 contraband cellphones for inmates, according to federal prosecutors.
Christine Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 charges including bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering.
Livingston worked for the South Carolina Department of Corrections for 16 years. She was promoted to captain at Broad River Correctional Institution in 2016, which put her in charge of security at the medium-security Columbia prison, investigators said.
Livingston worked with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to accept bribes for cellphones and other contraband accessories. They would take $1,000 to $7,000 over the smart phone Cash App money transfer program for a phone, according to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Reaves was known as Hell Rell and Livingston was known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors said.
Both face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and an order to pay back the money they earned illegally if convicted.
Reaves is serving a 15-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in the shooting of a man at a Marion County convenience store in 2015.
Lawyers for Livingston and Reaves did not respond to emails Friday.
Contraband cellphones in South Carolina prisons have been a long-running problem. Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said inmates have run drug rings, fraud schemes and have even ordered killings from behind bars.
A 2018 riot that killed seven inmates at Lee Correctional Intuition was fueled by cellphones.
“This woman broke the public trust in South Carolina, making our prisons less safe for inmates, staff and the community. We will absolutely not tolerate officers and employees bringing contraband into our prisons, and I’m glad she is being held accountable,” Stirling said in a statement.
The South Carolina prison system has implored federal officials to let them jam cellphone signals in prisons but haven’t gotten permission.
Recently, they have had success with a device that identifies all cellphones on prison grounds, allowing employees to request mobile phone carriers block the unauthorized numbers, although Stirling’s agency hasn’t been given enough money to expand it beyond a one-prison pilot program.
In January, Stirling posted a video from a frustrated inmate calling a tech support hotline when his phone no longer worked asking the worker “what can I do to get it turned back on?” and being told he needed to call a Corrections Department hotline.
From July 2022 to June 2023, state prison officials issued 2,179 violations for inmates possessing banned communication devices, and since 2015, more than 35,000 cellphones have been found. The prison system has about 16,000 inmates.
Stirling has pushed for the General Assembly to pass a bill specifying cellphones are illegal in prisons instead of being included in a broad category of contraband and allowing up to an extra year to be tacked on a sentence for having an illegal phone, with up to five years for a second offense.
That bill has not made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
1962 – Becomes a member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military arm of the ANC.
1963 – Arrested with other Spear of the Nation members and convicted of conspiring to overthrow the South African government. Zuma spends 10 years in prison on Robben Island.
1975 – Flees South Africa and lives in exile for 15 years in Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia and several other African countries, while continuing his work with the ANC.
February 1990 – President F. W. de Klerk lifts the ban on the ANC and other opposition groups. Zuma returns to South Africa.
ANC Leadership and Corruption Charges
1990 – At the ANC’s first Regional Congress in KwaZulu-Natal province, Zuma is elected chairperson of the Southern Natal region and takes a leading role in fighting violence in the region. This results in peace accords between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party.
December 1994 – Is elected as the national chairperson of the ANC.
1997-2007 – Deputy president of the ANC.
October 1998 – Receives the Nelson Mandela Award for Outstanding Leadership.
1999-2005 – Deputy president of South Africa.
June 2, 2005 – A South African court finds businessman Schabir Shaik guilty of bribing Zuma between 1995 and 2002.
June 14, 2005 – President Thabo Mbeki fires Zuma over his alleged involvement in the Shaik bribery scandal.
December 6, 2005 – Charged with raping a young female family friend; he claims the sex was consensual. He is acquitted on May 8, 2006.
September 5, 2006 – Brought to trial and charged with corruption for allegedly accepting bribes from French arms company Thint Holdings. On September 20, the charges are dismissed by the court after numerous extensions by prosecutors to build the state’s case.
2007-2017 – President of the ANC.
December 28, 2007 – New corruption charges are brought against Zuma, along with counts of racketeering and money laundering. The corruption charges are tossed by the court in September 2008.
May 1, 2008 – Named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.
January 12, 2009 – The Supreme Court of Appeal overturns the lower court ruling that threw out corruption charges against Zuma, stating that the ruling was riddled with errors. This new ruling means that the National Prosecuting Authority can press new charges against Zuma.
April 6, 2009 – Prosecutors drop all corruption charges against Zuma.
Presidency and Resignation
April 26, 2009– The ANC wins a majority of votes in South African elections, ensuring that Zuma will be the country’s next president.
February 2010 – Zuma admits to fathering a child out of wedlock with the daughter of the head of South Africa’s World Cup organizing committee.
December 2010 – Zuma files a $700,000 defamation lawsuit over a 2008 political cartoon which portrays him raping a female figure symbolizing justice.
March 20, 2012 – The Supreme Court of Appeal rules that the Democratic Alliance (an opposition party) can challenge a previous court’s decision to drop corruption charges against Zuma.
May 7, 2014 – Zuma secures a second term as president, with the ANC winning a majority of votes.
April 29, 2016 – A South African court rules that prosecutors acted “irrationally” when they decided to drop more than 700 corruption and fraud charges against Zuma in 2009. The court says the decision should be set aside and reviewed. It remains up to prosecutors whether to reinstate the charges.
November 2, 2016 – A report containing corruption allegations against Zuma is published. The 355-page “State of Capture” report contains allegations, and in some instances evidence, of cronyism, questionable business deals and ministerial appointments, and other possible large-scale corruption at the very top of government. Zuma denies any wrongdoing.
February 2021 – A South African inquiry into corruption during Zuma’s time in power is seeking the former president’s imprisonment for two years, after he defied a summons and court order to appear and give evidence. In an application in the constitutional court seen by Reuters, the “state capture” inquiry is seeking an order that Zuma is guilty of contempt of court. Zuma has denied wrongdoing and refuses to cooperate with the inquiry.
December 15, 2021 – The Gauteng High Court in South Africa rules that the decision to place Zuma on medical parole was unlawful and that Zuma needs to be returned into custody to serve the remainder of his sentence. Zuma appeals and remains on parole.
October 7, 2022 – South Africa’s Correctional Services department announces Zuma has been released from the correctional services system.
November 21, 2022 – South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal rules Zuma should return to prison, saying the decision to release Zuma on medical parole was unlawful.
August 11, 2023 – Zuma is returned to prison to comply with a ruling that his release on ill health was unlawful – but is freed after just an hour under a remission process to address overcrowding in jail.
GENEVA — Geneva-based commodities trading firm Gunvor said Friday that it has reached a $661 million settlement with U.S. and Swiss prosecutors after convictions for bribery of foreign officials in connection with the petroleum industry in Ecuador.
The Swiss attorney general’s office says the company didn’t take “reasonable and necessary organizational measures” to prevent bribery by its employees in the South American country over four years starting in February 2013.
A statement from U.S. Federal Court in Brooklyn said Judge Vitaliano sentenced Gunvor to pay a criminal penalty of over $374 million and forfeit more than $287 million in “ill-gotten gains.”
“Gunvor has accepted responsibility for the actions of certain of its former agents and employees – all of whom Gunvor stopped working with years ago and before it learned of the U.S. investigation – and pled guilty in federal court in New York” on Friday, the company said in a statement.
The Swiss prosecutors said the case involved payouts to that led the state petroleum company Petroecuador to award two oil-related contracts to Gunvor. U.S. authorities said the Geneva commodities trader earned more than $384 million in profits “from the business it corruptly obtained” related to the Ecuadorian oil company.
U.S. authorities said they had previously won convictions in New York of four people who pleaded guilty to money laundering-related charges, including former Gunvor consultants Antonio Pere Ycaza and Enrique Pere Ycaza; former Gunvor employee and agent Raymond Kohut; and Nilsen Arias Sandoval, a former senior Petroecuador official.
“Gunvor’s years long bribery scheme involving high-level Ecuadoran officials was both detrimental to the business environment and eroded the public’s trust and confidence in their government,” said FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Jeffrey Veltri in a statement.
He credited “significant cooperation” from authorities in the Cayman Islands, Colombia, Curacao, Ecuador, Panama, Portugal, Singapore, and Switzerland.
Gunvor was founded decades ago by oil traders Gennady Timchenko of Russia and Torbjörn Törnqvist of Sweden,
Timchenko, who is under international sanctions in connection with Russia’s war in Ukraine, divested his holdings in the firm and sold his shares to Törnqvist in 2014 as it appeared sanctions would be imposed against him.
