Bob Menendez Loses Bid to Toss Corruption Case Amid Laptop Flap

(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge ruled former US Senator Bob Menendez doesn’t deserve a new trial on corruption charges even though prosecutors gave jurors a laptop that contained evidence they weren’t supposed to see.

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It was “extraordinarily unlikely” that jurors were aware that 11 documents that had been ruled inadmissible in the case were included among the 3,000 other exhibits on the laptop, US District Judge Sidney Stein said Wednesday.

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After the trial ended in a guilty verdict in July, prosecutors disclosed to Menendez that the laptop had nine exhibits that the judge had ordered redacted. Defense lawyers later found two other unredacted documents.

Jurors convicted Menendez, 71, of bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. Prosecutors said the New Jersey Democrat took bribes of 13 gold bars, almost $500,000 in cash and a Mercedes-Benz as bribes from businessmen seeking favors. Two businessmen also were convicted at the trial.

Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 29. Prosecutors urged the judge to impose a 15-year prison term. Menendez, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the only public official convicted of serving as a foreign agent while in office, and his conduct is “perhaps more serious than that for which any other senator has been convicted in United States history,” prosecutors argued.

Defense lawyers said the failure to black out some of the information contained on the laptop allowed prosecutors to sneak in key evidence about Egypt that Stein said was not allowed. The judge barred the full exhibits under the US Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause, which protects lawmakers from legal actions arising from statements made during legislative activity.

Stein, who presided over the trial, said Menendez asked him to find that “the jury was a team of super sleuths, determined to uncover a few bits of information — that it had no reason to know existed — sprinkled on a few of pages within tens of thousands of pages of evidence.”

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The judge also said defense lawyers had enough time before deliberations began to examine the laptop and discover any errors in the exhibits — a notion that the Menendez team had argued was preposterous.

“Faced with the apparent failure of the defense to accurately review the exhibits themselves, counsel claim there was insufficient time to do so,” the judge wrote. “At no time, however, did any member of the three defense teams share this purported concern with the court or request more time to review the laptop.”

Menendez plans to appeal his conviction. In a statement, he said an appeals court will “hold these prosecutors to account for their misconduct,” which is the kind of behavior “that has caused so many to question the motives and judgments of overzealous prosecutors who act above the law and believe they are unanswerable to anyone.”

Menendez is planning to ask President Donald Trump for a pardon, according to a person familiar with the matter. Former President Joe Biden declined a pardon request before leaving office.

The case is US v. Menendez, 23-cr-490, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

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