Nadine Menendez, the wife of New Jersey’s disgraced former senator, Robert Menendez, played a central role in a yearslong plot to trade her husband’s political influence for bribes of cash, gold and a luxury car, a prosecutor told jurors on Monday at the start of Ms. Menendez’s federal bribery trial.
“They were partners in crime,” the prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, said of Ms. Menendez and her husband, who at the time led the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Partners in corruption.”
Ms. Pomerantz, a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, laid out the extensive array of charges Ms. Menendez is facing simply and bluntly in an opening statement.
“They were on the take,” she said, adding, “They put a price on the senator’s power and then sold it.”
Mr. Menendez and his wife were charged together in 2023 with taking bribes of gold bars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s efforts to steer military aid to Egypt and scuttle criminal cases that threatened his allies in New Jersey.
After a lengthy trial in Manhattan, he was convicted of taking bribes and acting as an agent of a foreign government and is expected to begin serving an 11-year prison sentence in June. Ms. Menendez’s trial was delayed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer; she underwent a mastectomy and completed reconstructive surgery less than two weeks ago, according to her lawyer and her husband.
The start of her trial unfolded in a starkly different fashion than her husband’s. During Mr. Menendez’s trial, the courtroom buzzed with reporters and teams of lawyers representing Mr. Menendez and two of his co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, New Jersey businessmen who were convicted of bribing the senator.
On Monday, however, Ms. Menendez arrived at court alone. Wearing a pink surgical mask and a gray sweater with decorative fringe, she sat by herself in the courtroom for much of the morning as the judge, prosecutors and her lawyer, Barry Coburn, awaited the arrival of a late juror.
Mr. Coburn’s opening statement was brief. He urged jurors to keep in mind the claims made by prosecutors and to scrutinize the testimony presented for evidence of Ms. Menendez’s “knowledge and intent.”
He repeatedly said that the prosecutors had presented a “nefarious” depiction of the events.
“There will be an absolute, utter failure of proof in this case with respect to knowledge and intent,” he said.
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