Businessman Wael Hana, pictured at left, poses with Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife, Nadine, during a meeting with several Egyptian officials, including Egyptian Major General Khaled Ahmed Shawky Osman (second from left). (Courtesy U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York)

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Sen. Bob Menendez stands pictured with his wife Nadine, Egyptian Major General Khaled Ahmed Shawky Osman (beside the senator), and businessman Wael Hana, far left, during a 2021 meeting in the senator's Washington, D.C. office. (Courtesy U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York)

In her work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sarah Arkin was tasked with briefing senators on global affairs, coordinating their diplomatic meetings and trips, and accompanying them on those encounters both at home and abroad.

So when Sen. Bob Menendez began secretly meeting and corresponding with Egyptian officials in 2018 outside those traditional channels, she and her colleagues found it “weird,” she testified Monday. Arkin’s testimony kicked off the seventh week of Menendez’s federal bribery trial in Manhattan.

Menendez was chair of the powerful committee from January 2021 until after his indictment in September.

“A critical part of my job is preparing him for those meetings,” Arkin said. “I didn’t know exactly who he was talking to or what information he had or didn’t have or who he might want to meet or where information was coming from.”

Prosecutors say that was intentional. They allege New Jersey’s senior senator, a Democrat, flouted normal protocols because he had an illicit deal with his friend and co-defendant Wael Hana, who gave him cash and gold bars in exchange for the senator currying favor with Egyptian officials so that they would grant Hana a lucrative monopoly on exporting halal meat there.

Arkin told jurors she became Menendez’s foreign policy adviser in 2016 and in 2018 joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she’s now a senior professional staffer.

Under questioning by prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Arkin testified that Menendez had always been an outspoken critic of Egypt because of its dismal human rights record. But in the spring of 2019, he told Arkin he wanted to be more quiet and private in expressing his humanitarian concerns about Egypt and instructed her to soften a letter she’d drafted calling out the country’s mistreatment and detention of critics and other affronts to democracy, Arkin testified.

He also organized several meetings without his staff’s knowledge with Egyptian officials they didn’t know and did not brief staff afterward, as he typically did, Arkin said. Even Egyptian nationals who worked at Egypt’s embassy in Washington, D.C., weren’t familiar with an official Menendez directed Arkin to call, she added.

“Soooo my guy at the embassy isn’t aware of anyone with that name but is going to try to run it down,” Arkin texted her colleague Damian Murphy, who’s now the committee’s staff director.

“That’s weird. How big is the embassy?” Murphy responded.

Arkin answered: “It’s pretty big but not THAT big.”

The more questions Arkin asked, though, the more irked Menendez got, according to testimony.

When he decided to travel to Egypt, he told Arkin she’d angered the Egyptians and barred her from going, even though she typically went on such trips and had been urging him specifically to visit Egypt, which historically has received more U.S. military aid than any other country besides Israel, she said. Instead, he took his then-girlfriend and now-wife Nadine, who “had a lot of opinions” on the trip and was “very involved” in its planning, Arkin said.

Richenthal showed jurors a text exchange in which Arkin and Murphy puzzled over it all.

“All of this Egypt stuff is very weird. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Murphy texted Arkin.

Richenthal also showed jurors messages indicating an unusually friendly relationship between the Menendezes and the Egyptian officials.

In one, Egyptian Major General Khaled Ahmed Shawky Osman called the senator “Bob” — a familiarity uncommon among those who interacted with the senator, Arkin said.

During the time of his “weird” approach to the Egyptian officials, Arkin testified, the committee released billions in military aid and arms to Egypt and Menendez was involved in several Middle Eastern initiatives, including a dam in Ethiopia that would impact the Nile River and Egypt and a natural gas deal off the Egyptian coast.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Avi Weitzman, Arkin testified that Menendez said he wanted to tone down his public criticism of Egypt because New Jersey is home to a large population of Coptic Christian Egyptians who support Egypt President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

Looking ahead

Earlier Monday, defense attorneys cross-examined FBI Special Agent Paul Van Wie, who presented a chain of emails, texts, and other correspondence and documents prosecutors introduced to bolster their case.

Under Weitzman’s questioning, Van Wie read texts prosecutors did not show jurors, which suggested a Bulgari purse and extravagant flower bouquet co-defendant Fred Daibes gave Nadine Menendez weren’t bribes, but rather birthday presents.

Weitzman also tried to poke holes in Van Wie’s testimony last week, when he narrated texts, Zillow listings, and other documents that showed the Menendezes were house-hunting and had looked at homes priced over $5 million. This was just a month before FBI agents visited their Englewood Cliffs home in June 2022 with a search warrant and seized more than $486,000 in cash, 13 gold bars, and other items they said were bribes.

“Are you aware that Zillow is often used as escapist fantasy by people?” Weitzman asked, prompting laughter from the jury.

Weitzman also pushed back on prosecutors’ claims that Menendez repeatedly Googled the price of gold, showing other online searches suggesting that the senator’s wife Googled things on his account. Menendez’s online history showed searches for everything from “the best blow dry bars in Washington, D.C.” to “how do you say girlfriend in Spanish.” The senator is fluent in Spanish.

Prosecutor Paul Monteleoni deflated that defense, though, by showing, on re-direct, texts between the senator and his wife after she had asked him to track down hair salon details for a friend.

Arkin is expected to remain on the stand Tuesday for further cross-examination.

Prosecutors have said they will question several more witnesses, including Shannon Kopplin, chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, and expect to rest their case this week. Defense attorneys for Menendez and his co-defendants Hana and Fred Daibes expect to take up to two weeks to present their defense, with the case going to the jury for deliberations possibly the week of July 8.

The case is running behind schedule. Monday was marked with several tongue-lashings from Judge Sidney H. Stein, who scolded defense attorneys for “sand-bagging the government” with frequent last-minute motions.

Menendez, 70, who has held his Senate seat since 2006, is charged with acting as a foreign agent, fraud, extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and related offenses. It’s his second corruption trial in seven years; the first ended in a hung jury in 2017.

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Fred Daibes, an Edgewater developer, right, leaving the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Manhattan after pleading not guilty to federal corruption charges on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. (Aristide Economopoulos for New Jersey Monitor)

Sen. Bob Menendez saw his fortunes climb even before Fred Daibes snagged a $95 million investment from a Qatari royal for a planned development along the Hudson River, according to testimony Thursday in his federal bribery trial in Manhattan.

Over several months in 2021 and early 2022, New Jersey’s senior senator researched the value of gold and luxury watches online while his wife scheduled tours of multimillion-dollar mansions for sale in Alpine and Englewood Cliffs and accepted a gifted lounge chair and Formula 1 race tickets for her son.

At the center of it all was Daibes, acting so much like Santa Claus that Nadine Menendez texted him: “Thank you. Christmas in January.”

On the 21st day of Menendez’s trial Thursday, prosecutors focused on Daibes and their claims that he schemed to hook Qatari investors by bribing Menendez to publicly praise the small Arab country on the Persian Gulf.

Jurors heard from FBI special agent Paul Van Wie, who laid out a timeline of texts, calls, encrypted messages, and other communications that show Menendez connected Daibes with Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, whose brother is Qatar’s emir, and Ali Al Thawadi, the sheikh’s chief of staff. The sheikh heads the largest construction and real estate company in Qatar and advises the emir on investments in the U.S., testimony showed.

When the sheikh’s investment adviser learned Daibes had been federally charged in a 2018 bank fraud case and urged the sheikh to reconsider, Menendez called and met with the sheikh and other Qatari officials in what prosecutors suggested was an attempt to smooth things over.

“I hope that this will result in the favorable and mutually beneficial agreement that you both have been engaged in discussing,” Menendez wrote to bin Jassim in an encrypted WhatsApp message in January 2022.

To sweeten the deal for the Qataris, prosecutors say Menendez shepherded a resolution praising Qatar’s humanitarian work through the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he then chaired, and issued a related press release that he forwarded to Daibes first, texts showed.

“You might want to send it to them. I am just about to release,” the senator told Daibes.

Daibes did just that, assuring the Qatari officials “our mutual friend” would issue it within days.

“At last,” the sheikh responded.

“It’s very good,” his chief of staff agreed.

In May 2022, Daibes and Heritage Advisers, a London-based investment firm the sheikh founded, signed a $190 million deal, with the sheikh footing half of it, according to documents Van Wie presented.

Many of the messages and documents Van Wie presented Thursday, under questioning by prosecutor Paul Monteleoni, seemed intended to prove the quid pro quo part of their argument — revealing the bribes the Menendezes allegedly accepted for the senator’s intervention and influence.

One exchange showed Daibes connected Nadine Menendez with the Tenafly real estate agent who scheduled tours for her of two homes priced at over $4 million.

Another showed that Menendez himself asked Al Thawadi for the Formula 1 tickets, saying Nadine Menendez’s son and his fiancee wanted them.

“Thank you. He is thrilled and so is his mother,” the senator texted Al Thawadi after receiving the tickets.

Defense attorney Avi Weitzman cast doubt on some testimony, like prosecutors’ claim that Daibes gave Menendez a new recliner as a bribe when the senator struggled to heal from a shoulder injury. Van Wie acknowledged under Weitzman’s questioning that prosecutors didn’t show jurors all of the Menendezes’ messages with others involved, including one text suggesting the recliner was a used loaner or hand-me-down.

“That chair has saved so many people in our family!” Daibes’ sister texted Nadine Menendez.

As for the luxury watches, Daibes shared screenshots of Patek Philippe watches ranging in price from about $10,000 to almost $30,000 with Menendez in 2021, asking which he liked, Van Wie testified. But prosecutors offered no receipts or messages proving a purchase occurred, and investigators found no such watches during a June 2022 search of the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home, testimony showed.

Earlier Thursday, prosecutors focused on Menendez’s effort to derail the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s 2018 bank fraud probe of Daibes.

“He is FIXATED on it,” Nadine Menendez assured Daibes by text.

Philip Sellinger, New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, previously told jurors that Menendez asked him to “look at” prosecutors’ handling of Daibes’ case and ended their longtime friendship when Sellinger reported he had a conflict of interest, prompting his Department of Justice bosses to recuse him from the case in December 2021. The recusal left Sellinger’s first assistant, Vikas Khanna, in charge of Daibes’ case.

Thursday, Van Wie presented documents and messages showing that Menendez subsequently researched and communicated with Khanna. The documents also showed that Menendez admonished Daibes’ attorney on a January 2022 phone call for being a “wuss” and not pushing the U.S. Attorney’s Office aggressively enough to dismiss the case, and that Daibes rejected two plea offers before prosecutors agreed in February 2022 to Daibes’ request for probation.

“He is an amazing friend, and as loyal as they come,” Daibes gushed about the senator in an email to Nadine Menendez.

The trial is expected to resume Monday morning, with cross-examination of Van Wie continuing and Khanna and Sarah Arkin, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, taking the stand.

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 13: Sen. Robert Menendez arrives for court on May 13, 2024 in New York City. Federal prosecutors accused Menendez and his wife of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes (Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images)

A political operative kicked off the sixth week of Sen. Bob Menendez’s federal bribery trial in Manhattan by ripping back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes duplicity and media manipulation that observers have long suspected drive politics in New Jersey.

Michael Soliman was state director of Menendez’s Senate office for seven years, ran his 2012 re-election campaign, and served on and off as his political adviser until last fall.

Under questioning by prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Soliman told jurors that he planted a false story in the press, coached Menendez on how to lie to people seeking political appointments, and vetted candidates for the senator with “optics” always driving his advice and actions.

“It was my job to protect the senator, so I just cared about his optics,” said Soliman, a partner at Mercury Public Affairs.

Tuesday’s questioning focused on just one part of the wide-ranging corruption scheme that has kept New Jersey’s senior senator and co-defendants Fred Daibes and Wael Hana in court almost daily since mid-May — the senator’s alleged attempt to squash the U.S. Attorney’s bank fraud prosecution of his friend Daibes, an Edgewater real estate developer and bank founder. Prosecutors say Daibes paid Menendez in cash and gold bars for his influence.

U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger testified last week that Menendez promised in 2020 to recommend him as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor. But the senator dropped him and chose another candidate, Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez, after Sellinger told Menendez that if he became U.S. attorney, he’d have to alert his new bosses that he once handled a case in which Daibes was an “adverse party,” a potential conflict of interest warranting his recusal.

Tuesday, Soliman spilled all sorts of secrets about the power of politics in who snags the top jobs in New Jersey. After Menendez asked him to vet Suarez, Soliman reported his findings in a text to the senator: “She is a Stack person but also viewed as an ally to Donald, since she used to work at his firm. Also Sacco signed off on her because she agreed to take on Ralph Lamparello’s wife as her top aide.”

Stack is state Sen. Brian Stack; Donald is attorney Donald Scarinci, a childhood friend of Menendez; Sacco is former state Sen. Nicholas Sacco; and Ralph Lamparello is a past president of the New Jersey State Bar Association and a powerful Hudson County insider.

Suarez’s candidacy drew media scrutiny quickly, largely focused on her controversial decision not to prosecute a campaign staffer for Gov. Phil Murphy who had been accused of rape. When a Star-Ledger editor reached out to Soliman with questions critical of Suarez’s candidacy, Soliman alerted Menendez, texting him that Suarez’s lawyer planned to send a letter threatening the outlet, which published a column anyway.

When New Jersey Globe editor David Wildstein told Soliman he planned to do a story on the U.S. attorney candidates, Soliman said he and Menendez had several concerns. They worried Suarez would be seen as a diversity hire, a “hot button” issue they wanted to avoid before the election, Soliman testified. And they wanted to divert attention from Suarez, whose negative publicity they worried could taint Menendez, he added.

“Please try and delay” the story, the senator urged Soliman in a text sent on the encrypted app Signal.

Wildstein agreed to wait, Soliman said, but asked again the next month, after then-U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito’s resignation left the job open. Soliman told jurors he gave Wildstein a list of candidates he said Menendez was considering for the job, including Jamel Semper, a prominent attorney the Black clergy subsequently championed and who later became a federal judge.

But the story that Menendez and Sen. Cory Booker were eyeing more than two candidates was wholly false, Soliman testified.

Menendez never considered recommending anyone but Sellinger and then Suarez for the job, even though the White House requested at least three candidates, Soliman said.

When the candidates followed up with Menendez to inquire about their chances, Soliman told jurors that he and the senator strategized what lies would best appease them — and blamed the White House for not picking them.

When the negative publicity dogging Suarez did not die down, Menendez began plotting “a Plan B,” he wrote in a text to Soliman that was presented to jurors.

About that time, Sellinger and Soliman talked again, Soliman testified.

Sellinger told Soliman he’d talked to his new bosses and didn’t have to recuse himself, Soliman said. That contradicts what Sellinger testified last Wednesday.

After the White House dropped Suarez as a potential U.S. attorney, Menendez again recommended Sellinger, who got the job — and told his bosses on his first day of potential conflicts in four cases. They ordered him recused from three, including Daibes’.

Menendez was “confused” and asked Soliman to find out why Sellinger had been recused from Daibes’ case after supposedly telling Soliman that he wouldn’t be recused, Soliman testified. But Soliman told jurors he never asked Sellinger about Daibes when the men met for lunch. That’s because Sellinger warned him he’d have to report Soliman to the Department of Justice if he inquired about any ongoing criminal matters, Soliman testified.

The day began with Menendez attorney Avi Weitzman cross-examining Sellinger, who conceded that Menendez never asked him or pressured him to resolve the Daibes matter in any particular way.

“He didn’t say that your recommendation to be the next U.S. attorney was in any way conditioned on decisions you would make in the Daibes case?” Weitzman asked.

“No,” Sellinger responded.

Testimony is expected to continue Thursday morning in Manhattan, with an FBI agent scheduled to share more evidence. Prosecutors expect to wrap up their case by next Tuesday, and defense attorneys told Judge Sidney H. Stein they expect to take up to two weeks to present their side of the case.

This story has been updated to correct the year Michael Soliman referenced in running Sen. Menendez’s re–election campaign.

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Fred Daibes, an Edgewater developer, right, leaving the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Manhattan after pleading not guilty to federal corruption charges on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. (Aristide Economopoulos for New Jersey Monitor)

Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial is going on a two-day break after one of his co-defendants, Fred Daibes, tested positive for COVID-19.

Daibes, a real estate developer and bank founder from Edgewater, was coughing throughout Wednesday’s proceedings, which were largely focused on his role in the wide-ranging corruption case.

Judge Sidney H. Stein that Daibes canceled court for Thursday and Friday, scheduling testimony to resume Monday at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse. The trial is already in its fifth week of testimony.

Prosecutors have said Daibes paid Menendez cash and gold bars in expectation of New Jersey’s senior senator using his political powers to derail his bank fraud investigation.

U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger told jurors Wednesday that Menendez, in offering to suggest he be nominated as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, complained to him in 2020 that Daibes “was being treated unfairly” by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and asked him to “look at it (Daibes’ case) carefully” once he became U.S. attorney.

Sellinger instead told Menendez, a Democrat, that he likely would be recused from the case, because he once handled a lawsuit in which Daibes was an “adverse party” and he’d have to reveal that as a potential conflict of interest to his supervisors at the federal Department of Justice. Menendez subsequently chose a different candidate and ended his friendship with Sellinger, Sellinger testified. Sellinger got the job anyway a year later, after Menendez’s pick fell through.

Sellinger was scheduled to return to court Thursday for cross-examination.

Jurors also were expected to hear Thursday from several witnesses about prosecutors’ claims that Daibes also bribed Menendez to help him land a lucrative investment from a member of Qatar’s royal family.

Menendez did so by praising the Qatari government in an August 2021 press release — first using an encrypted messaging app to secretly share the announcement with Daibes so the developer could share it with the investor and a Qatari government official, according to the indictment. He also ushered a resolution praising Qatar through the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired at the time, prosecutors say.

The trial, which was expected to last until the end of June, is behind schedule. Stein earlier this week fretted about the trial continuing too far into July and interfering with jurors’ summer plans. He directed prosecutors and defense attorneys to cooperate more and speed up their questioning.

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 11: Fred Daibes arrives for trial at Manhattan Federal Court on June 11, 2024 in New York City. Jose Uribe, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors in their case against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) testified on Monday. He will continue his testimony regarding a backyard meeting with the senator in September 2019. Menendez along with his wife Nadine are facing bribery charges. The indictment is the second in eight years against Menendez. The indictment also includes charges for Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Uribe who are cooperating with federal prosecutors in hopes of a lenient sentence. Nadine Menendez's trial is expected to take place later this summer. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The U.S. Attorney for New Jersey told jurors in Manhattan Wednesday that Sen. Bob Menendez complained to him about the criminal prosecution of his friend and asked him to “look at it carefully.”

Philip Sellinger is the second top enforcement official from New Jersey to testify during Menendez’s corruption trial, which is now in its fifth week, that the senator asked for special treatment in a specific criminal matter. Former state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal testified last week that the three-term Democrat asked him about an insurance fraud investigation threatening to ensnare a friend’s company.

Sellinger told jurors he was a private attorney angling to become New Jersey’s new U.S. attorney at the time of his December 2020 conversation with Menendez in the senator’s Washington, D.C., office.

New Jersey’s senior senator told Sellinger that his friend Fred Daibes “was being treated unfairly,” according to Sellinger.

“Sen. Menendez hoped that if I became U.S. attorney, I would look at it carefully,” Sellinger told jurors.

Daibes’ name didn’t ring any bells, so Sellinger assured the senator he would regard all cases carefully as U.S. attorney, he testified. But he called the three-term Democrat the next day to inform him that he discovered he’d been involved in a 2017 lawsuit against the borough of Edgewater that implicated Daibes, a real estate developer and bank founder there. If he became U.S. attorney, he told Menendez, he’d have to alert his bosses at the Department of Justice about it as a potential conflict of interest and they would decide if he should recuse himself from the case, he testified.

That didn’t end the matter. Sellinger recounted in court several other calls and meetings — by Menendez and his associates — where they brought up the Daibes case.

Sellinger said the senator’s ask was unusual. The U.S. attorney is the top federal law enforcement official in New Jersey, overseeing all operations, including 1,500 criminal and 2,500 civil cases a year, as well as investigations and appeals, Sellinger told jurors. That means the person in that position rarely gets personally involved in specific cases, he added.

Sometime later, Menendez told Sellinger that he wouldn’t suggest President Biden nominate him to be New Jersey’s next U.S. attorney, saying the White House had requested multiple candidates to consider. Menendez instead named Esther Suarez — now Hudson County’s prosecutor — as his pick.

When her appointment later fell through, Sellinger reached back to Menendez to tell him he was still interested, and by December 2021, he had the job. On his first day as U.S. attorney, he reviewed the office’s major cases and alerted his new supervisors of four cases where potential conflicts of interest might warrant his recusal — including Daibes, he testified.

The next week, Sellinger’s bosses ordered him off the Daibes case.

A friendship ended

Sellinger told jurors he first met Menendez about 20 years ago, when he began supporting his campaign fundraisers. They became so close that Sellinger attended the Menendezes’ October 2020 wedding, and the two couples socialized.

But it didn’t take long after Sellinger’s recusal from Daibes’ case for him learn the senator was irked, testimony showed. Sellinger told jurors he called Menendez in March 2022 to see if he’d speak at the formal ceremony recognizing his appointment.

“He said, ‘I’m going to pass. 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.

Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz asked Sellinger what he thought the senator meant.

“That we no longer had a relationship,” Sellinger responded.

Prosecutors have accused Daibes of giving the Menendezes cash and gold bars in exchange for his help in squashing his criminal troubles. Daibes has long been accused of using money to expand his influence in Edgewater, schemes the State Commission of Investigation revealed last year.

As Wednesday wound to a close, defense attorney Avi Weitzman began his cross-examination. He focused on Sellinger’s reputation and self-perception as someone whose integrity and good name are of paramount importance. Weitzman asked: Had he made those “core values” known to Menendez?

“I never believed him to be asking me to do something unethical or improper,” Sellinger said.

Jose Uribe cross continued

Earlier Wednesday, defense attorneys finished cross-examining Jose Uribe, the failed insurance broker who became the prosecution’s star witness when he agreed to plead guilty and testify against his co-defendants.

Uribe has said he gave Nadine $15,000 for a down payment for a new Mercedes-Benz convertible and paid her monthly $900 payments for almost three years in a “deal” that required her to connect him with the senator, who he expected to “stop and kill all investigation.”

The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, at that time, had indicted Uribe’s friend Elvis Parra and Uribe worried investigators’ continuing, expanding probe would reach a company, Phoenix Risk Management, that he was running illicitly after he was barred from the business because of his own 2011 insurance fraud conviction.

Through questioning by defense attorney Adam Fee, Uribe acknowledged that he never mentioned money or the Mercedes to Sen. Menendez, spelled out the terms of his deal with Nadine Menendez to the senator, or discussed details about the senator’s calls and meeting with Grewal.

While Fee spent Tuesday trying to depict Uribe as a chronic liar and criminal, he spent Wednesday morning attacking his memory, accusing Uribe of regular intoxication and Xanax use.

“Sir, have you driven drunk before?” Fee asked Uribe, prompting an objection from prosecutors that Judge Sidney H. Stein sustained.

Uribe denied he was drunk or otherwise incapacitated when he met with Menendez.

“I am not sitting with a U.S. senator to discuss a serious matter when I am intoxicated,” he said.

Wednesday also brought some ping-ponging testimony from prosecutors and defense attorneys about some of the more salacious moments of Uribe’s testimony.

Fee suggested during cross-examination that Uribe made up his “super weird” claim that Menendez rang a little bell to summon Nadine when the men needed paper so Uribe could write down the names of the people and companies he wanted the senator to inquire about.

But Pomerantz showed jurors a text Nadine sent Fred Daibes in August 2019 that read: “I am looking for the perfect bell. I have not found it yet, but I will.”

Earlier, Fee tried to cast doubt on Uribe’s claim that Menendez told him in Spanish during a dinner when Nadine Menendez had disappeared to the bathroom: “I saved your little a** not once but twice.”

Pomerantz then showed jurors a text Menendez sent his wife during that dinner that read: “Can you go to bathroom.”

Also on Wednesday, Stein held a closed-door hearing about Nadine Menendez’s trial date, which had been scheduled for July 8. He pushed it to Aug. 5 but requested additional information from her doctors about the state of her breast cancer, her prognosis, and a projection for when she might be able to assist in her defense in hopes of setting “a more realistic trial date.”

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 2: New Jersey businessman Jose Uribe, 56, arrives at Manhattan court after being indicted on bribery charges in conjunction with Senator Bob Menendez and his wife Nadine Menendez on October 2, 2023 in New York City. Menendez and his wife are accused of taking bribes of gold bars, a luxury car and cash in exchange for using Menendez's position to help the government of Egypt and other corrupt acts according to an indictment from SDNY unsealed on Friday. The indictment is the second in eight years against Menendez. The indictment also includes charges for Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

After Jose Uribe, the star witness in Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial, spent two days detailing how he bribed the three-term Democrat, defense attorneys spent Tuesday painting Uribe as a habitual liar and longtime criminal whose cooperation deal with prosecutors makes his testimony unbelievable.

Uribe, a failed insurance broker, faces 95 years in prison for seven federal crimes he pleaded guilty to in March. But he acknowledged on the stand Tuesday that he agreed to testify against Menendez, the senator’s wife, and co-defendant Wael Hana in hopes of dodging prison altogether.

Menendez attorney Adam Fee and Ricardo Solano Jr., who represents Hana, spent six hours on cross-examination Tuesday working to taint Uribe’s credibility.

“You’re a very good liar, aren’t you?” Fee asked Uribe.

This prompted an immediate objection from prosecutors, which Judge Sidney H. Stein sustained.

Solano was up first, asking about Uribe “practicing” his testimony with prosecutors. Uribe told jurors he met prosecutors and investigators 10 to 15 times since December, when he agreed to cooperate with their investigation.

“I don’t like the word ‘practicing,’” Uribe responded. “I would say I was preparing for the questions and the answers.”

Fee and Solano reminded jurors Uribe initially lied to prosecutors, telling them the tens of thousands of dollars he spent on a luxury car for Nadine Menendez was a loan she planned to pay back, before he changed his story after signing the cooperation agreement.

He bristled at any suggestion he would lie in court.

“When I took the stand, I took an oath,” he told the jury. “The truth is the truth.”

But Solano and Fee spent the day reminding jurors of Uribe’s long career of lying.

Uribe’s career in the insurance industry should have ended in 2011, when he pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and theft by deception for defrauding customers of his company Inter-America Insurance.

But after he lost his license and shuttered Inter-America, he started another insurance business, Phoenix Risk Management, and installed his son Omar Contreras, and later his daughter’s friend Ana Peguero, as the licensed brokers and firm owners, even though he continued to run it, he testified.

Phoenix was one of five companies Uribe ran, and he put his relatives and friends in charge of most of them, he testified. That allowed him to avoid paying taxes, he agreed under cross-examination.

He also admitted he invented a phony tax preparer and submitted fake income figures to secure a pandemic-era small business loan he didn’t qualify for. He fudged documents to cover his crimes, testimony showed, prompting Fee to call him a “sophisticated liar.”

“The activities are, in fact, crimes, correct?” Solano asked Uribe.

“Yes,” he responded.

Uribe has presented himself during his three days on the stand as a dedicated family man with a strong code of honor. He has testified that he decided to host a fundraiser for Menendez, which raised $50,000, and buy a Mercedes-Benz convertible worth more than $67,000 for Nadine Menendez in exchange for Sen. Menendez pressuring state authorities to “kill and stop all investigation.”

His goal, he has repeated throughout his three days on the stand, was to protect his family — especially Peguero, who he called “my Ana” — from the New Jersey attorney general’s expanding insurance fraud probe.

But Solano and Fee suggested that was just another lie, saying he exposed his family to legal trouble by putting his companies in their names and then committing tax evasion and other crimes.

“Was the real concern about yourself?” Solano said.

Under the cooperation deal, prosecutors won’t investigate or prosecute Uribe further, and neither will the federal Department of Justice’s tax division. Uribe has pleaded guilty to bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and related offenses. His sentencing is scheduled for Friday.

What jurors won’t hear

Some of the points defense attorneys tried to make on cross-examination might have little impact on the trial because Uribe repeatedly professed to have no memory of what they asked about.

At least 80 times Tuesday, he said some variation of “I have no recollection of that.” Jurors are supposed to consider only witnesses’ answers in their deliberations, and not attorneys’ questions or comments.

Uribe told jurors he couldn’t remember how many victims he fleeced in his 2011 insurance fraud case (seven), how much he took from them ($76,819), or how lawsuits against his companies unfolded. Testimony showed that Hana was one of the businessmen whose companies failed after Uribe took their money for insurance premiums but failed to secure policies for them, according to the cross-examination. But Uribe said he didn’t remember that either.

Defense attorneys wanted to tell jurors about Uribe’s past failures to pay child support and credit card bills, as well as his conduct at strip clubs, which Lawrence Lustberg, one of Hana’s defense attorneys, didn’t detail but described as “absolutely antithetical to the family values Mr. Uribe has expressed.”

Such details would undermine his claim that everything he does is for the benefit of his family and show his lying and criminal troubles were “not an isolated incident but continuous conduct,” Lustberg and Solano said.

But Stein refused to allow any of it, calling it prejudicial, personal, and potentially confusing to the jury.

Tuesday’s testimony revealed a few scandalous details, including Fee’s revelation that Menendez had broken off his relationship with Nadine Menendez in December 2018 “because she was causing too much drama.”

Fee has said that Nadine concealed the bribes she’s accused of taking, and asked Uribe if he concealed his criminal history from Menendez for similar reasons — to get what he wanted from one of New Jersey’s most powerful public officials.

“If you had told him these things, he would have stood up and walked out of the room,” Fee said, prompting an objection from prosecutors that Stein sustained.

Uribe is expected to take the stand for a fourth day Wednesday, when Fee will continue his cross-examination. The trial is expected to last into the first week of July.

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Jose Uribe, front, toasts Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife Nadine at one of several dinners he and his friends treated the couple to during what prosecutors say was a wide-ranging bribery scheme that started in 2018. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York)

Throughout his month-old bribery trial, Sen. Bob Menendez’s defense attorneys have repeatedly insisted the favors federal prosecutors have deemed bribes were merely “constituent service” the Democrat did in a long career dedicated to public service.

But co-defendant Jose Uribe torpedoed that notion in one blink-and-miss-it sentence in Manhattan Monday, Uribe’s second day on the stand.

“I saved your little a** not once, but twice,” Uribe said the senator told him in Spanish.

Uribe testified that Menendez told him this during a summer 2020 dinner Nadine Menendez, the senator’s then-girlfriend and current wife, had suggested to celebrate their successful “deal.”

Under a two-part arrangement first forged with co-defendant Wael Hana in the spring of 2018, Uribe said, he and his friends wanted the senator to accomplish two things for them. First, kill the state’s insurance fraud prosecution of Elvis Parra, Uribe’s friend and a trucking company owner. And two, end the related, expanding investigation that threatened Uribe’s own business, Phoenix Risk Management. In exchange, Uribe, Parra, and Parra’s business partner Bienvenido Hernandez were to pay Hana $200,000 to $250,000, while Hana would buy Nadine a Mercedes-Benz convertible, Uribe testified.

Uribe testified he had spent more than two years trading texts and calls about the scheme with Nadine Menendez and had so many restaurant meetings — with the Menendezes and others associated — that the courtroom erupted in laughter when Judge Sidney H. Stein interrupted Uribe’s retelling of one rendezvous to say: “Another restaurant?”

The night Menendez made the “little a**” comment, Uribe told jurors Menendez acted like “a person that was proud and confident that he managed to get this done.”

Most of Monday’s testimony seemed intended to underscore what the senator knew and did, during a trial where both sides agree Nadine Menendez routinely acted as an intermediary who connected her powerful partner with deep-pocketed friends and acquaintances who wanted his influence.

Uribe first took the stand Friday and offered a bombshell in his first few minutes of testimony, telling jurors flat-out that he bribed Menendez and his wife in a bid to obtain the senator’s influence. He pleaded guilty in March and testified against his co-defendants in a cooperation deal.

Monday, he shared the tawdry details of the alleged schemes, telling jurors that Nadine Menendez arranged for Uribe to meet the senator in September 2019 in the backyard of her Englewood Cliffs home, where the two men talked for about an hour over glasses of Grand Marnier about an insurance fraud probe by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, Uribe testified.

“I beg him to please do anything in his power” to learn about the investigation and stop it, Uribe testified.

Uribe said Menendez asked him to write down the names of the pertinent people and companies, but neither man had any paper. Menendez rang a little bell he had on a table and called for Nadine by summoning “mon amour,” Uribe testified.

Nadine brought paper, Uribe jotted down the details, and the senator stuck it in his pocket for a meeting he mentioned he had scheduled the next day to discuss the investigation, Uribe said.

Later, Uribe testified, Menendez called him to say, “That thing that you asked me about, there’s nothing there. I give you your peace.”

“What did you understand him to be talking about?” prosecutor Lara Pomerantz asked.

“My family was safe and I was in peace. I was happy,” Uribe said.

Gurbir Grewal, the former New Jersey attorney general who met Menendez the day after the Englewood Cliffs meeting between Uribe and Menendez, told jurors last week he doesn’t discuss open criminal cases with any outsiders and cut the senator off during that meeting when he realized where it was going. He did “nothing” in response to Menendez’s request, Grewal testified.

But Uribe told jurors Monday that he, Parra, Hernandez, and Hana considered Menendez’s intervention to be successful. Parra, who faced jail time, instead got probation when he pleaded guilty in June 2019. The men met for a celebratory dinner, and Hernandez and Parra paid Hana $125,000 in cash, Uribe said.

“He was happy. We were happy for him,” Uribe said. “Being that part one is done, then I didn’t have doubt that part two was going to be completed.”

Uribe continued to pay for Nadine Menendez’s car and had no idea his criminal troubles weren’t over until June 2022, when FBI agents came knocking on his door, seized his phone, and told him he was under investigation, he testified.

Six months later, Nadine Menendez mailed Uribe’s attorney a brief note and a $21,000 check, saying it was repayment for Uribe’s “personal loan,” Uribe testified. He told jurors he and Nadine never had any agreement that she would repay the money — and that the $21,000 was less than he’d spent so far on her car anyway.

Uribe spent most of Monday under direct questioning by Pomerantz. Hana’s attorney Ricardo Solano Jr. started cross-examining him as the dinner hour approached, underscoring Uribe’s admissions that Uribe — not Hana — reached out to Nadine Menendez directly, hosted a fundraiser for the senator’s re-election campaign that raised $50,000, and bought Nadine Menendez the car.

The trial is expected to resume Tuesday morning, with cross-examination of Uribe continuing.

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 2: New Jersey businessman Jose Uribe, 56, arrives at Manhattan court after being indicted on bribery charges in conjunction with Senator Bob Menendez and his wife Nadine Menendez on October 2, 2023 in New York City. Menendez and his wife are accused of taking bribes of gold bars, a luxury car and cash in exchange for using Menendez's position to help the government of Egypt and other corrupt acts according to an indictment from SDNY unsealed on Friday. The indictment is the second in eight years against Menendez. The indictment also includes charges for Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

A failed insurance broker from New Jersey told jurors in Manhattan Friday that he bribed Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife in exchange for the senator killing the prosecution of a friend and stopping an expanding criminal investigation that threatened to ensnare his own company.

The afternoon’s bombshell testimony riveted the packed courtroom, as federal prosecutor Lara Pomerantz got straight to the point after Jose Uribe, a co-defendant who pleaded guilty in March in a cooperation deal, approached the stand under the steady gaze of New Jersey’s senior senator.

“Have you ever committed a federal crime?” she asked.

“Yes, I have,” Uribe responded.

“Does that include bribery of a public official?” she asked.

“Yes, I did,” Uribe said.

Uribe then told the hushed court Menendez was that public official; his wife, Nadine, accepted the bribes; and a co-defendant, Egyptian American halal meat exporter Wael Hana, was in on it, too.

“I agreed with Nadine Menendez and other people to provide a car for Nadine in order to get the power and influence of Mr. Menendez,” Uribe said.

Uribe’s testified his goal was twofold. He wanted to stop the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office from prosecuting his friend Elvis Parra, a trucking company owner who had been indicted for insurance fraud. He also wanted to derail the expanding investigations into the company, Prestige Trucking Express, that Parra created afterward with his business partner Bienvenido Hernandez, as well as Uribe’s insurance brokerage, Phoenix Risk Management. Phoenix secured insurance for both of Parra’s firms.

Menendez whispered to his attorney throughout Uribe’s testimony. Outside after court, the Democrat told reporters in Spanish: “Wait for the cross-examination, and you’ll see what the truth is. You’re going to see — this has been prepared for weeks, for weeks.”

From insurance fraud to bribery

Uribe spent two and a half hours laying out how he came to meet the Menendezes and play a pivotal role in the senator’s second corruption trial in the past decade.

The Dominican Republic native and divorced father of four told jurors he began working in the insurance industry around 1989 after he immigrated to Union City in 1985. He started his own insurance brokerage, Inter-America Insurance, in 2001, where he specialized in securing insurance for transportation and construction companies, he testified. His family worked for him, he said.

He got charged with insurance fraud and theft by deception, lost his license, and closed the agency in 2011, he testified. He started Phoenix Risk Management soon after — illegally, because his conviction didn’t allow him to continue working in the industry, he said.

The new company had much of the same staff as the shuttered one and inherited all its clients, and Uribe’s son Omar got a license and became its agent of record, while Uribe continued as its general manager, he testified. When his son left two years later to go to law school in Seattle, Uribe promoted his daughter’s friend Ana Peguero to the firm’s agent of record, he said. Uribe and his son transferred ownership to Peguero in 2018, and Uribe told jurors they became so close he considers her a daughter.

He told jurors he met Hana around 2007 when Uribe secured insurance for a trucking company Hana owned at the time.

Their bribery scheme started in early 2018, when Hana — who shared an office with Uribe’s attorney, Andy Aslanian — overheard Uribe talking with Aslanian about Parra’s case and subpoenas Uribe’s firm had received in relation to the state’s expanding investigation. Parra faced jail time, and Uribe told jurors he was worried about him. Parra was a good friend he met after he helped Parra obtain intermodal motor transport insurance, which allowed Parra’s company to work in the port.

Hana pulled Uribe into the hallway, Uribe said, and told him “for something like $200,000, $250,000 —  I don’t remember the amount — he got a way to make these things go away.”

Hana told Uribe he could go to Nadine Menendez, and she would go to the senator, Uribe said. Uribe shared details of the conversation with Hernandez because Prestige was under investigation, too, and he figured Parra and Hernandez also could benefit from Hana’s offer, Uribe testified.

Uribe then scheduled a meeting at a Marriott hotel lounge in Teaneck for the men to talk, he said. While Hana didn’t outline how exactly the senator and his wife would end their criminal troubles, Uribe said, he, Parra, Hernandez, and Hana agreed to proceed with their scheme.

“The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Uribe texted Hana later, to confirm terms.

Uribe told jurors he organized a fundraiser, at Hana’s suggestion, in July 2018 in Cliffside Park to support Menendez’s reelection campaign. The event, with a suggested donation of $5,000 per person, raised $50,000, he said.

“I wanted to be in the good grace of the senator,” he said. “Things looked to be on their way.”

Failed promises

Several months later, a state detective named Suzanna Lopez reached out to Peguero and requested an interview.

Uribe’s frustration and desperation were growing, according to texts prosecutors presented earlier this week and again Friday.

“I am f***ed man,” Uribe texted Hana in October 2018. “The whole thing is going. Bad. I have no face to talk to my family … Please be sure that your friend knows about this, just as a last favor.”

In court Friday, Uribe confirmed that “your friend” in that text meant Menendez.

“All I wanted was to protect my family and this woman to leave them alone,” Uribe testified Friday, referring to the detective.

Uribe met Hana and the Menendezes for dinner, but he didn’t bring up his request for the senator’s help in the criminal cases “out of respect” for Hana, who he later concluded was “looking to kiss a** to Mr. Menendez.”

“It was pointless,” he told jurors of the dinner.

The state’s investigation proceeded, so by March 2019, Uribe decided to take matters into his own hands, he testified. He got Nadine Menendez’s number from Aslanian and reached out to her, he told jurors.

“She put a line of complaints about how her life is not going well. Most men who promised her things in the past never come through,” he testified.

Hana had promised her a car but never delivered, she told Uribe. Hana had planned to pay for the $67,000-plus Mercedes-Benz convertible Nadine wanted out of the $200,000 to $250,000 Parra and Hernandez promised to pay for Menendez’s influence, Uribe testified. It’s unclear if that money was ever paid or to whom.

Uribe saw a solution — he offered to buy Nadine Menendez the car in exchange for her help with the senator, he told jurors.

“She agreed to the terms,” Uribe testified. “I was willing to do anything in my power, and if that was to buy a car for Nadine to help me, I would get it done.”

Gurbir Grewal, New Jersey’s former attorney general, took the stand Thursday to confirm that Menendez called him twice and met with him once in 2019 to intervene in an insurance fraud case involving the trucking industry, but he told jurors he ended their conversations before the senator provided details and did not intervene. Parra eventually pleaded guilty and got probation.

As the dinner hour approached Friday, Stein dismissed the jury for the weekend. Uribe is expected to take the stand again Monday morning.

Fingerprint evidence

Earlier Friday, jurors heard from Kira Glass, a fingerprint examiner based at the FBI’s Quantico, Virginia, headquarters.

She testified that the FBI identified eight of Sen. Menendez’s prints on five cash-stuffed envelopes in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home in June 2022, when investigators seized gold bars, gold coins, nearly $500,000 in cash, and other items they say were bribes.

Investigators also found prints belonging to Nadine Menendez on envelopes seized from her bank safe deposit box, as well as the prints of co-defendant Fred Daibes and several other men prosecutors have associated with the bribery scheme.

One envelope found in the locked bedroom closet that defense attorneys have insisted belonged to Nadine Menendez alone had the prints of both Menendez and Daibes on it, Glass said. That is significant because it dents defense arguments earlier in the trial that any evidence found in the closet had nothing to do with the senator because he had no access to that area.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Adam Fee tried to weaken that evidence by questioning Glass about another fingerprint agents identified this year on a cash-stuffed envelope. It belonged to Yanik Fenton Espinosa, a Zumba instructor in Miami who once worked for former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican. It was unclear how her fingerprints ended up on an envelope in Menendez’s home, but under Fee’s questioning, Glass acknowledged that fingerprint examiners can’t determine how, where, when, or why prints end up on objects.

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 27: Gurbir Grewal, Director of Enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaks during a press conference at the SDNY office on April 27, 2022 in New York City. Williams announced the arrest and indictment of Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang, the founder and head of a private investment firm Archegos, and Patrick Halligan, Archegos’s Chief Financial Officer, on charges of racketeering conspiracy, securities and wire fraud offenses in connection with schemes to unlawfully manipulate the prices of publicly traded securities in Archegos’s portfolio and to defraud leading global investment banks and brokerages. The fraud is alleged to have increased Archegos’s portfolio from $1.5 billion to $35 billion in one year. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The day in September 2019 Gurbir Grewal was summoned to Sen. Bob Menendez’s office in Newark, he expected to discuss a policy issue — perhaps new initiatives that Grewal, then New Jersey’s attorney general, had implemented to reduce gun violence and opioid deaths.

Instead, New Jersey’s senior senator wanted to talk about a pending case, Grewal told jurors Thursday, the 15th day of Menendez’s federal corruption trial in Manhattan.

Grewal said he cut Menendez off before he could say any more, advising the senator to have the defendant’s attorney take any concerns directly to the judge or prosecutors in the case. The meeting ended minutes later, and Grewal paused outside with his colleague Andrew Bruck, who had accompanied him.

“Andrew said to me, ‘Whoa, that was gross,'” Grewal testified.

While more than a dozen witnesses have testified so far, Grewal offered some of the most dramatic moments of the trial so far, as just the second to share his personal experience alleging Menendez tried to use his political power for personal gain. His testimony — which packed the courtroom with spectators — came six days after a former federal official told jurors that Menendez called him and told him to “quit interfering” in his friend’s business deal with Egypt.

In Grewal’s case, he said he still doesn’t know the identity of the defendant Menendez wanted his help with. He never asked, nor alerted anyone in his office about Menendez’s “pretty unprecedented” request, because of his longtime practice of not talking with any outsiders — even powerful lawmakers — about pending criminal matters, he testified. The goal was to “insulate” his staff and ward off the chilling effect such interventions might have on prosecutions, he said.

“There has to be a process in which those issues are raised up through the right channels,” Grewal said.

Testimony on Wednesday showed that Menendez planned to talk to Grewal about Elvis Parra, a trucking company owner who was scheduled to stand trial for insurance fraud in April 2019.

Jose Uribe, a failed insurance broker, wanted the senator to persuade state authorities “to kill and stop all investigation” in Parra’s case, in which an Uribe-linked insurance company called Phoenix Risk Management was implicated, according to texts and other evidence. In exchange, testimony showed, Uribe spent tens of thousands of dollars to help Menendez’s wife, Nadine, buy a new Mercedes-Benz convertible.

The alleged bribes didn’t work. Parra eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve non-custodial probation and pay restitution, while Grewal said he did “nothing” in response to Menendez’s alleged meddling.

Under questioning by federal prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Grewal — who now heads the enforcement division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — acknowledged that Menendez made no “explicit ask” during the meeting or phone calls and was “polite” throughout their interactions.

“What I understood the upshot of this conversation to be was that he didn’t like how this matter was being handled by our office and wanted it handled differently,” Grewal said.

Grewal told jurors the meeting and the two brief phone calls that preceded it concerned him because Menendez, a Democrat, was a close political ally of Gov. Phil Murphy at that time.

“That was my concern, of sort of being on his bad side,” Grewal said of the governor.

He had financial reasons to be concerned, too, he said. The attorney general’s office gets about half its $1 billion budget from state funds and the rest from other sources, including federal funds, he testified.

“You want to maintain good relationships,” he told jurors.

Grewal conceded, under cross-examination by defense attorney Avi Weitzman, that other public officials have asked him to intervene in criminal cases.

Former state Sen. Dick Codey, who also served as New Jersey’s acting governor in 2004, complained to Grewal about the prosecution of a basketball coach, and a chief of staff in the Murphy administration also tried to intervene in an unspecified case, Grewal agreed under Weitzman’s questioning.

Grewal said he gave both men the same advice he gave Menendez — to have the defendants’ attorneys share their gripes with the assigned prosecutors and judges. And he issued a memo afterward barring anyone at the governor’s office trying to intervene in prosecutions, modeled after a federal Department of Justice policy for White House staff, he testified.

Grewal testified that after his interaction with Codey, Codey introduced legislation prohibiting the state attorney general and a few other top public officials from running for governor for a certain period after their terms end.

“Is it fair to say, as a result of that conversation with  Dick Codey, you did experience retaliation from him?” Weitzman asked Grewal.

“I don’t know if it was a result of that particular matter  or not,” Grewal said.

Codey told the New Jersey Monitor Thursday that it’s “absolutely not” true that his legislation was a form of retaliation against Grewal.

As Thursday’s testimony wound to a close, Richenthal countered Weitzman’s Codey questioning with a follow-up question to Grewal that oozed sarcasm: “Do two wrongs make a right?”

Judge Sidney H. Stein sustained Weitzman’s immediate objection.

The trial’s most sensational testimony is expected Friday when Uribe will take the stand. Uribe was indicted alongside Menendez in September and pleaded guilty in March in a deal with prosecutors in which he agreed to testify against Menendez and their co-defendants. An FBI fingerprint specialist also is set to testify Friday.

Reporter Nikita Biryukov contributed to this report.

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