In March 2019, an aide to Senator Robert Menendez drafted a letter that used strong language to criticize the president of Egypt and the country’s human rights record. Mr. Menendez declined to sign it.
Mr. Menendez, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he wanted to try a less confrontational approach, the aide, Sarah Arkin, testified on Monday at the senator’s bribery trial.
“We’ve been going after them for so long on human rights — have been really out there publicly criticizing them — and it hasn’t really changed anything on the ground,” Ms. Arkin, a senior staff member with the committee, said Mr. Menendez had told her.
Instead, Mr. Menendez said he wanted “to be a little less publicly critical and do more private and quiet engagement,” Ms. Arkin said.
Ms. Arkin’s testimony came at the start of the seventh week of the senator’s trial in Manhattan federal court. Mr. Menendez, 70, is charged with steering aid and weapons to Egypt in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes as part of a wide-ranging and yearslong conspiracy.
He has strenuously maintained his innocence, and as Mr. Menendez was leaving court on Monday he defended his record related to Egypt and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. “No one has been a harsher critic of Egypt,” Mr. Menendez said. “No one has been more persistent a critic of President el-Sisi on the question of human rights, democracy, rule of law.”
But according to an indictment, Mr. Menendez’s refusal to adopt Ms. Arkin’s harshly worded critique of Egypt coincided with an important moment in the alleged bribery scheme.
Less than a month later, a company run by Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman who was based in New Jersey and was friendly with the senator’s wife, was awarded a lucrative halal meat certification monopoly by the government of Egypt. Prosecutors say Mr. Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, was used to funnel bribes to the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, 57.
Mr. Menendez went on to sign a bipartisan letter with 16 other senators that encouraged the secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, to address human rights concerns with Mr. el-Sisi during the Egyptian president’s April 2019 visit to Washington — a fact the senator’s lawyer, Avi Weitzman, noted during cross-examination of Ms. Arkin.
In questioning her, Mr. Weitzman elicited testimony that suggested Mr. Menendez’s change in tactics had not altered his fundamental views or his willingness to confront Egyptian officials.
Mr. Weitzman asked Ms. Arkin if the senator was still “committed to human rights improvements in Egypt.”
“I don’t think he said it that way,” Ms. Arkin, whose foreign policy portfolio included the Middle East, said. “But he did continue to raise human rights concerns with Egyptian officials in meetings in which I was present.”
Ms. Arkin also testified about a series of incidents involving the senator and Egyptian officials that she characterized as unusual.
Mr. Menendez had held meetings with Egyptian officials, including Gen. Ahmed Helmy, Egypt’s top spy in Washington, that she was never told about. The lack of disclosure was contrary to routine protocol, she told jurors.
For example, Ms. Arkin said, she learned of a March 2020 meeting with General Helmy only after getting an email from a colleague indicating that the Egyptian intelligence official had talked directly with the senator about Egypt’s concerns over a hydroelectric dam Ethiopia was building on the Nile River. Egypt was opposed to the dam and feared it would cut into the country’s water supply, and Mr. Menendez later urged the State Department to take a more active role in the dispute.
In September 2021, as she was helping Mr. Menendez plan a congressional delegation trip to Egypt and Qatar, Ms. Arkin testified, she received a text message from her boss, Damian Murphy, then the staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Murphy was passing along a message from the senator, instructing Ms. Arkin to coordinate the trip’s details with an “Abdel Maguid,” a person whose name neither of them recognized.
“All of this Egypt stuff is very weird,” Mr. Murphy wrote to her in a text message shown Monday to jurors. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ms. Arkin called the Egyptian Embassy in Washington to try to locate the individual, later identified as Mai Abdelmaguid, an Egyptian intelligence officer who had befriended Ms. Menendez.
That call set off red flags at the embassy, rattling Ms. Abdelmaguid, who had been quietly helping to plan the couple’s trip to Egypt.
“Nadiiiiiine, i will probably loose my job,” Ms. Abdelmaguid wrote to Ms. Menendez in a text message that contained a typo, according to an evidence chart previously shown to jurors.
General Helmy introduced Ms. Adbelmaguid to Ms. Menendez in October 2020, several days after she and the senator were married, according to the evidence chart.
The two women had been texting regularly. Their friendship had begun with a dinner meeting and questions about the best hair salons in Washington. Ms. Abdelmaguid would later ask her to pass messages to the senator.
Ms. Menendez also provided information to Ms. Adbelmaguid.
In June 2021, she sent Ms. Abdelmaguid an article about the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, by Saudi operatives at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The senator had shared the article with Ms. Menendez, who forwarded it to Ms. Abdelmaguid before a meeting Mr. Menendez held with other senators and General Abbas Kamel, the chief of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service. The article raised questions about whether Egyptian intelligence officials were involved in Mr. Khashoggi’s death.
“Wanted to give you a heads up so you can prepare your answers,” Ms. Menendez said in a text message.
In advance of the congressional trip to Egypt, the two women traded ideas for the itinerary.
“Is there any chance he can sit on a camel in Egypt?” Ms. Menendez texted Ms. Abdelmaguid. “I’m dying for him to be on a camel.”
“Of course there is a chance for that!” Ms. Abdelmaguid responded. “Leave that to me.”
As for Ms. Arkin, she testified that she had learned Mr. Menendez was upset with her because someone had told him she had led Egyptian officials to believe that “under no circumstances” would Mr. Menendez meet with Mr. el-Sisi while in Egypt, news that had greatly upset the Egyptian government.
“This had very much upset the government and it was a big kerfuffle and he didn’t want me to go on the trip anymore,” she said.
Ms. Arkin, who told the jury she had never said such a thing, testified that she eventually sat down with Mr. Menendez and explained that the statement attributed to her was untrue.
“Someone is lying to you and it’s not me,” Ms. Arkin said she had told the senator. “I need to know that you have confidence in me doing my job going forward.”
“He said, ‘Absolutely, of course,’” she recalled.