The US Department of Justice indicted the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, alleging that they accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for exploiting the senator’s position to whitewash the Egyptian authorities. The indictment stated that they provided sensitive information to the Egyptian government and secretly helped direct military aid to Egypt. The indictment confirmed that the bribes “included cash, gold, mortgage payments, a job with a salary but no work for his wife, a luxury car and other things of value”.
According to the indictment, Nadine, Menendez’s wife, together with a friend of hers who is now his co-defendant, Egyptian-American businessman Wael Hana, introduced the Democratic senator to intelligence and military officials in Egypt. Menendez had great power and influence over military aid to Egypt as a ranking member, and then chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The indictment added that during dinners and meetings with Egyptian officials, Menendez and his then girlfriend, now his wife, promised to use his political power to facilitate US military sales and financing to Egypt, in exchange for putting his wife on the payroll of one of the other defendant’s companies, appointing her, the indictment says, to “a job that does not require attendance”.
After one of these meetings, according to the indictment, Menendez requested from the US State Department highly sensitive information about the number of people working at the US embassy in Egypt as well as their nationalities. Menendez later sent a detailed text message about a person working at the embassy to his then girlfriend, who forwarded it to the other defendant, who in turn sent the sensitive information to an Egyptian official. The senator was also accused of disclosing non-public information about military aid to Egypt to people who passed the information on to Egyptian officials.
Menendez also helped draft a letter on behalf of the government of Egypt “aimed at persuading other US senators to release USD 300 million in aid to Egypt”. The indictment says that after being provided with a briefing passed on from the Egyptian government on the country’s requests for military financing and sales, Menendez asked his wife to pass on a message to Egypt that he “will sign off on this today”. In his message, Menendez claimed that the financing, worth a total of at least USD 99 million, includes target practice rounds and 10,000 rounds of tank ammunition, with a note stating that “these tank rounds are for tanks Egypt has owned for many years, and they use them in the counterterrorism campaign in Sinai”. In the end, the message reached an Egyptian official, who responded with the “thumbs up” emoji, meaning “OK”.
