After a month and a half of testimony from government witnesses, lawyers for Senator Robert Menendez this week are expected to begin rebutting the web of corruption charges facing New Jersey’s senior senator, once one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are likely to wrap up their case against Mr. Menendez by Wednesday. Mr. Menendez’s lawyers will then begin to call witnesses; they have said they might call as many as four dozen.
Mr. Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he doled out political favors to friends and foreign governments in exchange for bribes both eye-popping and mundane: hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz, Formula One race tickets, a reclining chair and an exercise machine.
He is charged with acting as an agent of a foreign government and is the first senator in American history to be indicted twice in separate bribery cases — facts that have infused the proceeding with a sober, precedent-setting tone.
One key unanswered question is whether the senator will testify in his own defense before jurors are asked to decide whether prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York have proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Mr. Menendez did not take the witness stand during his first bribery trial, and it seems unlikely now. The earlier case, in federal court in New Jersey, ended in a mistrial in 2017.
Here are some highlights from the senator’s sixth week of trial:
Inconsistent testimony
Two of Mr. Menendez’s former allies in New Jersey — Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, and Michael Soliman, a political strategist who ran several of the senator’s campaigns — testified last week against their longtime friend.
Among the charges Mr. Menendez faces are claims that he pressured Mr. Sellinger to go easy on Fred Daibes, a real estate developer who had been accused of bank fraud by the office that Mr. Sellinger now runs. In turn, prosecutors say Mr. Daibes, who is on trial with Mr. Menendez, rewarded the senator with cash and gold.
Mr. Sellinger, who was recommended for his job by Mr. Menendez, offered careful responses. He explained that the Justice Department barred him from involvement in Mr. Daibes’s bank fraud case because of an unrelated lawsuit his former firm had brought that was “adverse” to the developer.
He said he never believed Mr. Menendez was “asking me to do anything unethical or improper.”
But jurors were left with an unclear picture of what Mr. Sellinger might have said about the Daibes case before Mr. Menendez advanced his name for the prominent Justice Department post.
“You never told Mr. Soliman that you believed you could still oversee or supervise the Daibes case, correct? Yes or no,” Avi Weitzman, one of Mr. Menendez’s lawyers, asked him.
“I told him what the process was and that the deciding official was somebody in the Department of Justice in Washington,” Mr. Sellinger answered, sidestepping the actual question.
The judge, Sidney H. Stein, pressed him on whether he had discussed the potential conflict of interest with the Justice Department, after an objection from a prosecutor.
“I had not discussed that with the Department of Justice,” Mr. Sellinger responded.
Mr. Soliman offered a different account of the conversation.
“Did there come a time, in that time period, when you spoke about potential recusal with Mr. Sellinger?” a prosecutor, Daniel C. Richenthal, asked.
“We spoke by phone,” Mr. Soliman testified. “He told me that he was trying to reach the senator, that he could not reach the senator. He wanted me to let the senator know that he checked with Main Justice and that in fact he did not have to recuse himself.”
A senator searches for gold prices
An F.B.I. agent testified that he was asked to review documents used by prosecutors to create a chart outlining telephone calls, text messages, emails, voice mail recordings and internet searches.
The records included Mr. Menendez’s internet search history dating back to 2008.
The agent testified that the senator’s first search tied to gold was on April 5, 2019, when he asked “what is the spot price of gold” in an internet query.
Mr. Menendez repeatedly turned to the internet to determine gold prices, according to evidence introduced last week.
For example, the day after he and his wife, Nadine Menendez, returned from a trip to Qatar and Egypt and were picked up at the airport by a driver for Mr. Daibes, Mr. Menendez conducted two searches for the price of gold, asking, “how much is one kilo of gold” and “how much is one kilo of gold worth.”
The senator’s lawyers have offered an innocuous explanation for the frequent internet searches, suggesting they were linked to gold passed down to Ms. Menendez by relatives who were in the Persian rug business.
“Eventually Nadine needed to sell those kilograms of gold bars that she had from her family, and she did that for a perfectly legitimate reason,” Mr. Weitzman told jurors in an opening statement. “That’s why there were searches on Bob’s phone for the price of gold.”
The agent also testified, however, that at least two of the gold bars were stamped with serial numbers traced to gold owned by Mr. Daibes, whose lawyers have described him as a “habitual” gift giver.
Formula 1 race tickets
Jurors have been shown scores of text messages sent by Mr. Menendez, read emails and news releases he wrote tied to the governments of Egypt and Qatar and heard former allies testify that he was displeased by certain criminal prosecutions.
But on Thursday, they saw evidence of him asking directly for a favor — and it wasn’t for himself.
“Good afternoon,” the senator wrote to a Qatari official on the messaging app, Signal, in May 2022. “Nadine’s son lives in Miami and would like to attend the Formula One Race with his fiancé, would you have any tickets available for him?”
After some back and forth, two tickets were sent.
“Thank you!” Mr. Menendez wrote. “He is thrilled and so is his mother.”
At the time, Mr. Daibes was negotiating the terms of a joint venture with an investment company run by a Qatari sheikh. It was Mr. Menendez who had introduced Mr. Daibes to the Qataris, according to trial testimony, and the company, Heritage Advisors, later contributed $95 million for an ownership stake in Mr. Daibes’s real estate project in Edgewater, N.J.
Legal bickering over witnesses
From the trial’s start, Judge Stein has sought to keep the proceedings moving. He gently admonishes lawyers when their questioning of witnesses appears repetitive, and he reminds them to exchange documents with each other in a timely way.
“I think there’s still too much gamesmanship going on here,” he told the lawyers last month out of the jury’s presence.
But the legal jockeying has continued, most recently over Judge Stein’s request that the parties give each other lists of their remaining witnesses and summaries of what they would say.
A week ago, Mr. Richenthal, the prosecutor, complained that Mr. Menendez’s lawyers had provided a witness list of 48 people who might testify on the senator’s behalf.
“It is very difficult for us to plan with a list of 48,” Mr. Richenthal said.
Judge Stein, addressing Mr. Menendez’s attorneys, said, “You are not going to sandbag the government here with 48 names.”
Mr. Weitzman, the senator’s lawyer, responded that prosecutors had not yet narrowed their remaining witness list, of 18 names, and only then could the defense streamline its list.
When the issue arose again last Thursday, Judge Stein directed the parties, by Friday, to give each other a “true witness list.”
But on Saturday, the prosecutors, making clear they were unsatisfied, wrote to the judge, asking that he formally order Mr. Menendez’s lawyers to immediately provide their list of witnesses and summaries of their expected testimony.
A trial, the government wrote, “is not yet a poker game in which players enjoy an absolute right always to conceal their cards until played.”