Robert Menendez ‘Put His Power Up For Sale,’ Prosecutors Say in Senator’s Trial (2024)

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Here are 5 takeaways from the opening statements in Robert Menendez’s corruption trial.

Mr. Menendez, 70, betrayed little emotion as he watched the opening statements from the courtroom, where he is facing some of the gravest charges ever leveled against a sitting U.S. senator. He has pleaded not guilty.

He is being tried alongside two of the businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. Prosecutors have also charged Ms. Menendez, but her trial was delayed until July for health reasons.

Here are five takeaways from the senator’s third day on trial:

The prosecution tried to keep it simple.

Prosecutors have spun a dizzying set of accusations against Mr. Menendez, filing four rounds of charges that involve a halal meat monopoly, a Qatari sheikh and the inner workings of the U.S. government. All of it could easily confuse jurors.

So laying out a road map for their case, they offered the panel a far simpler view: “This case is about a public official who put greed first,” said Lara Pomerantz, an assistant U.S. attorney. “A public official who put his own interests above the duty of the people, who put his power up for sale.”

What the jury needed to understand, she insisted, was that favors were granted by Mr. Menendez, including a letter ghost written to help Egypt and calls to pressure important government officials. In exchange, the couple amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, bars of gold and much more, with Ms. Menendez as a “go-between.”

The defense: A tale of two Menendezes.

Mr. Menendez’s lawyer, Avi Weitzman, used his first words to the jury to flatly deny that arrangement. But the heart of his defense was a head-turning proposition: Do not confuse the senator with his wife.

Mr. Menendez, his lawyer said, was “an American patriot,” the son of working-class immigrants who made it to Congress. All those instances of Mr. Menendez purportedly abusing his office to help a foreign power or New Jersey businessmen? They showed a senator “doing his job,” Mr. Weitzman said, asserting that the government had found no record of Mr. Menendez negotiating bribes.

He did not say the same of Ms. Menendez, who had come late into the senator’s life and concealed her financial burdens and communications from him, according to the lawyer. Mr. Weitzman did not outright say that Ms. Menendez accepted bribes. But if she did, he wanted to make it clear that his client did not know “what she was asking others to give her” — especially all that gold.

The gold was hidden in a closet.

To make his point, Mr. Weitzman displayed photographs of a closet that he said belonged to Ms. Menendez. It was there, in her private quarters, he disclosed, that the F.B.I. found the gold bars and cash with Mr. Daibes’ fingerprints.

The senator did know that his wife had some gold, but assumed it was from her wealthy family of Persian rug dealers, the lawyer said. When Mr. Menendez repeatedly searched for the price of gold on Google, the lawyer said, he was looking to see how much money Ms. Menendez could generate from that family gift — not to cash out a bribe.

“He did not know of the gold bars that existed in that closet,” he said.

Likewise, Mr. Weitzman said Mr. Menendez had been in the dark about how Ms. Menendez got the funds to purchase a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible. In a guilty plea, another New Jersey businessman admitted that he gave Ms. Menendez the car “in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation.”

The high stakes trial is being overshadowed. Blame Trump.

The case against Mr. Menendez could hardly be more serious. It has already made history: Mr. Menendez is the first senator to be indicted in more than one bribery case. (The first ended in a mistrial in 2017.)

But as his trial opened this week in Lower Manhattan, it was hard to escape the conclusion that it was being overshadowed by the state courthouse just a few hundred yards away. That is where, thanks to a quirk of timing, former President Donald J. Trump is in the midst of his hush-money trial.

The first ever trial of a former president has inspired wall-to-wall cable news coverage. Unlike the Menendez case, it includes nationally known witnesses, like Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. And it has attracted a parade of high-profile visitors to buck up Mr. Trump, including the speaker of the House.

All of it is probably good news for Mr. Menendez and his party, which is vulnerable to political attacks after allowing him to continue serving in the Senate under indictment.

Expect a long trial. That’s not good for Senate Democrats.

The case has proceeded unusually quickly since the government first brought charges in September 2023. As for the trial, do not expect a verdict anytime soon.

Prosecutors have said they may take as many as six weeks to lay out the tangled web of corruption they say surrounded Mr. Menendez. When Judge Sidney H. Stein read a list of dozens of potential witnesses (including several sitting senators), he informed jurors they would be likely to hear testimony in Spanish and Arabic.

The defense has indicated it will then take another one to two weeks, setting up a verdict sometime around July 4. Except for odd days off, Mr. Menendez will be stuck in the courtroom the whole time, depriving Democrats of a key vote in the Senate, where they control a spare 51-to-49 majority.

Maria Cramer and Maia Coleman contributed reporting.

Menendez was ‘doing his job,’ his lawyer says.

And when a real estate developer, Fred Daibes, asked for help with a stalled project, the senator acted on behalf of a constituent, Mr. Weitzman said during opening statements on Wednesday at the beginning of the New Jersey Democrat’s corruption trial.

“In short, the evidence will show Bob was doing his job and he was doing it right,” Mr. Weitzman told the jury.

In an opening that lasted more than an hour, Weitzman referred to the senator as “Bob,” describing him as a dedicated legislator and “American patriot” who was not taking bribes but doing the everyday job of a legislator.

Mr. Weitzman, in a telling moment that indicated how the defense would present its case to the jury, said that Mr. Menendez had no idea that the gold bars found in his wife’s closet had come from Mr. Daibes.

Ms. Menendez is being tried separately in July. She is accused of acting as a go-between for Mr. Menendez, Egyptian intelligence officials and businessmen, including Mr. Daibes, who were seeking political favors from the senator.

But Mr. Weitzman said that Ms. Menendez had financial troubles she was trying to keep from her husband. Her dealings with New Jersey businessmen like Mr. Daibes had nothing to do with Mr. Menendez, Mr. Weitzman said.

Mr. Weitzman suggested that it was easy for Ms. Menendez to keep her husband in the dark about her “financial challenges.”

The senator and his wife kept separate lives — not even sharing a phone plan — and the senator adored Ms. Menendez, whom he found “dazzling” and began dating in 2018, Mr. Weitzman said.

She was beautiful, tall and spoke four languages, Mr. Weitzman said: “Bob fell for her.”

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Menendez was a senator ‘on the take,’ prosecutors said.

“This was not politics as usual,” Ms. Pomerantz said of Mr. Menendez, a Democrat who until last year led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This was politics for profit. This was a United States senator on the take.”

More than once she turned and gestured toward Mr. Menendez, who was seated behind her, flanked by his lawyers.

Mr. Menendez, 70, leaned forward attentively, but showed no obvious emotion, his hand at times resting on his chin and over his mouth.

Prosecutors have charged Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, with a multifaceted bribery scheme that lasted from 2018 to 2023. The senator, Ms. Pomerantz told jurors, steered aid to Egypt — a country she said “was hungry” for American support. He meddled in criminal cases involving businessmen in New Jersey, Ms. Pomerantz said.

And, with Mr. Menendez’s backing, the government of Egypt “dropped a lucrative monopoly” in the lap of friend, who, she said, had no experience in the industry.

In exchange, the senator was given bribes of gold bars, cash and a luxury car, she said.

“For years,” Ms. Pomerantz said, “Robert Menendez betrayed the people he was supposed to serve by taking bribes.”

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This is the second time Menendez faces federal corruption charges.

Mr. Menendez was accused in 2015 of doing favors for a friend, Dr. Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor from Florida, in exchange for gifts, including rides on a private plane, and political donations. He was charged with 12 counts of corruption, including six counts of bribery and three counts of honest services fraud. Dr. Melgen was also accused in the case and tried alongside Mr. Menendez.

The trial, which lasted more than two months in late 2017, centered on whether Mr. Menendez’s friendship with Dr. Melgen had crossed a legal line, raising questions about intent, friendship and official government acts.

Closely watched in Washington for its implications on political donations, the trial in Newark saw appearances from several high-profile figures, including Senator Cory Booker, another New Jersey Democrat, and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, both of whom testified as character witnesses for Mr. Menendez.

During closing arguments, Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Menendez, called the charges “a lot of hooey over nothing,” saying that there was “a Grand Canyon” between the evidence presented and the accusations leveled against the senator. Peter Koski, the lead prosecutor, in his closing statements rebutted: “Friendship and bribery can coexist, ladies and gentlemen.”

After less than two weeks of deliberations, jurors said they were unable to reach a verdict, leaving the presiding judge, William H. Walls, to declare a mistrial. One juror told reporters afterward that 10 of the 12 jurors had supported finding Mr. Menendez not guilty.

In January 2018, prosecutors announced that they intended to retry Mr. Menendez, but less than a week later, Judge Walls acquitted Mr. Menendez and Dr. Melgen of seven of the 18 charges they faced.

The Justice Department dismissed all the remaining charges against the senator a few days later, leaving Mr. Menendez free to return to Congress and begin campaigning for re-election.

He went to Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, about an investigation into Fred Daibes because he was concerned about a conflict of interest: Sellinger was involved personally in a separate lawsuit involving Daibes, Weitzman said. “Bob acted lawfully, appropriately and entirely for the benefit of New Jerseyans,” Weitzman said.

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Weitzman adds that there is nothing criminal about helping constituents who are also friends of his or his wife. “You may not like it, but it’s not illegal,” he said.

In Washington, will the Menendez scandal elicit more than a shrug?

But after Mr. Menendez brusquely rebuffed them, Democrats and Republicans in the clubby Senate largely moved on. Most have had little to say about the case since, leaving Mr. Menendez free to continue his congressional work as he fights to prove his innocence.

Fellow Democrats have offered explanations. They point out that Mr. Menendez was stripped of his committee chairmanship after the charges, and that he has all but acknowledged his political career is over.

Many — including Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader — have defended Mr. Menendez’s right to clear his name. (The senator was indicted once before but never convicted because of a hung jury; this time, he has pleaded not guilty.)

Perhaps more surprisingly in a capital where partisans are typically eager to weaponize corruption accusations, Republican senators have mostly given a pass to Mr. Menendez, a well-liked deal-maker who has spent three decades in Congress, and to his party.

“I’m really glad he’s not a Republican,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said on Wednesday.

The tone could yet ramp up as prosecutors air their case in the coming weeks. But with a war in the Middle East consuming the Senate and former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial continuing in New York, there are few signs that senators are eager to talk more about Mr. Menendez — except one.

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has tried unsuccessfully to persuade the chamber to expel Mr. Menendez and expressed frustration that the New Jersey senator’s colleagues were willing to let him stay.

“I’ll never understand how people were OK with that,” he said.

Mr. Fetterman said he was particularly alarmed by accusations that Mr. Menendez had worked as a foreign agent for Egypt, accepting gold bars and other lucrative payoffs, at the same time he was serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He argued that Mr. Menendez deserved his day in court but that the Senate should hold its members to a stricter standard.

“It just gets more and more indefensible why we can’t come together and chuck him,” he said.

For now, Mr. Menendez’s trial will have at least one very tangible impact in the narrowly divided Senate. With Mr. Menendez stuck in a New York courthouse five days a week for the next two months, he will not be able to cast votes or participate in committee hearings.

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In a setback for the senator on this point, Judge Stein issued a ruling yesterday precluding his lawyers from presenting testimony from a psychiatrist who had evaluated Menendez. Her testimony had been expected to address the cash authorities found stockpiled in Menendez’s home.

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“Resist that urge, ladies and gentlemen,” Weitzman said, to judge Menendez on the gold and cash found in his home.

He also said Menendez was engaging in diplomacy with Egyptian officials. When he asked about pending criminal cases and investigations, he was trying to make sure investigators were treating his constituents fairly. “That’s what dedicated public servants do,” Weitzman said.

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For Egypt, Menendez was key to accessing billions in U.S. aid.

In return, according to a federal indictment of Mr. Menendez unsealed last September, Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, checks and bars of gold.

Since the late 1970s, Washington has sent Cairo up to $1.3 billion each year as a legacy of Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel in the Camp David Accords — money that Egypt treasures as a sign of its strategic importance and which has paid for its ever-growing military arsenal.

For Egypt, the United States is an indispensable patron, one that it constantly tries to convince of its value on issues including terrorism, security for Israel and migration to Europe. Sitting in the southeastern Mediterranean on Israel’s western border, it paints itself as an island of stability in a turbulent region that includes Sudan and Libya.

Since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013 by deposing the country’s first democratically elected leader, Egypt has arrested tens of thousands of activists, opposition politicians, researchers, journalists and other perceived political opponents, including some Egyptians whose only apparent offense is re-sharing Facebook posts critical of the government. It has also muzzled the news media and quashed all protest.

During the years when prosecutors say Mr. Menendez was doing favors for Egypt, other members of Congress were clamoring for more restrictions to be put on the military assistance, or for tranches of it to be frozen, until Egypt improved its human rights record.

Mr. Menendez was one of those calling for change. He was one of 17 senators who signed a 2018 letter pressing the Trump administration to raise “the erosion of political and human rights” in Egypt when Mr. el-Sisi visited Washington.

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Here are 7 reasons people gave to avoid jury duty.

Other explanations were less conventional. Not all resulted in immediate disqualification. Here are a few:

• One juror told the judge, Sidney H. Stein, that he had an extreme fear of heights and would have difficulty serving in a courtroom on the 23rd floor of the federal courthouse. The man, who works as a financial adviser on the second floor of an office building in New Jersey, said he was already feeling anxious and unwell. “I’m really sorry, everybody,” he said as he was excused from service and escorted from a room adjacent to the courtroom, where the judge questioned jurors with hardship claims for the better part of two days.

• A doctoral candidate studying art history at CUNY said she had a grant to conduct research at the Centre Pompidou’s archives in Paris next month. Judge Stein suggested that she might shift her research to later in the summer. “In August, Paris is empty,” he said, apparently unaware of the onrush of tourists expected this summer for the Olympic Games.

  “August,” she replied, “the archives are closed.”

• A woman who works as a law professor explained somewhat sheepishly that she had tickets to see a Bruce Springsteen concert in Spain during a five-week, prepaid summer vacation in Europe scheduled to start later this month.

  “Springsteen just announced his tour dates for the next year — seriously,” Judge Stein offered.

  “Will he live that long, though?” the prospective juror responded about the rock icon, who is 74.

  “He’s decided just to keep on going,” the judge concluded, declining to immediately dismiss the woman. “So, you can catch him, probably.”

• A graduate student said she was applying to roughly 25 medical schools and explained that the applications, due in the coming weeks, included multiple essays, which she had not completed. “So that is a priority of mine,” she said. Judge Stein asked about her flexibility to work on the applications at night and on weekends. She explained that she volunteered as an unpaid epidemiologist and also worked 30 hours a week as a gymnastics coach.

• A graphic artist who works for late-night comedy television shows said he did not believe he could be impartial. “I’ve certainly worked on things critical of the senator,” he told the judge on Monday. The judge was unconvinced.

  The man then added that he had safety concerns, given that some of the charges were tied to foreign governments. “There’s a lot of fears when it comes to this stuff,” he said.

  “This is not the Trump trial,” Judge Stein replied, adding, “I’ve never heard any issue like that here.”

  Still, the man persisted, noting that he had a fear of the Saudi Arabian government — a country not listed among the names and places jurors had been read at the start of the selection process.

  “Now I think you’re simply trying to get out of jury duty,” the judge said.

  That’s when the man made a final pitch that seemed to reveal a curious set of priorities.

  His pregnant wife, he said, was expected to deliver a baby on June 15.

  He was among the final batch of jurors excused on Wednesday.

• A woman said she had nonrefundable tickets to travel to Rome and Greece in June. She said she was meeting up with a sister who she had only recently met. “A half sister that I just met in December ’20,” the woman explained.

  “I’m tempted to ask people for proof,” Judge Stein said before dismissing the juror.

• A cyclist described a planned three-month cross-country bike trip that was planned to start May 30.

  ”I take it that’s something you can cancel, if need be?” the judge asked, eliciting a yes.

  “And reschedule?” he pressed.

  “Well,” the cyclist answered, “not as easy.”

Senator Bob Menendez’s famous children carry a burden.

The drama has been relentless. In March, new developments underscored the gravity of the case against the Menendezes’ father, who, with his wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of accepting bribes of gold, cash and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for an array of political favors.

After a former ally pleaded guilty and began cooperating with prosecutors, Senator Menendez and Nadine Menendez were additionally charged with obstructing justice. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Alicia and Rob Menendez used to be game to talk publicly about their father, joking about his penchant for playing Super Mario Bros., his love of musical theater — “Wicked” is his favorite show, they said in a 2011 campaign ad — and his bragging about being on the varsity bowling team in high school.

These days, they are less eager to talk about him. But their desire for privacy is complicated by the fact that they too are public figures who cannot, without sacrificing their own careers, avoid a public spotlight.

Rob Menendez, 38, is fighting for political survival in a June 4 Democratic primary. He and his father share a name, and Senator Menendez has not ruled out running for re-election in November as an independent candidate — leaving open the possibility that both could appear on the same ballot and confuse voters.

Alicia Menendez, 40, has been forced to address the charges against her father — and calls for his resignation — on live television.

The legal drama has unfolded in parallel with important events in the siblings’ own careers. In March, a judge ordered Senator Menendez and his wife back to court just as Alicia and Rob were preparing for President Biden’s State of the Union address — Alicia would be contributing to MSNBC’s live coverage of the event, and Rob would be in attendance, a member of the congressional assembly.

Friends and colleagues say that it is a challenging time emotionally and professionally for Alicia and Rob Menendez, both of whom declined through spokesmen to comment for this article.

They are unlikely — however unfair it may be — to escape the stigma of the allegations against their father, said Sally Quinn, the longtime writer from The Washington Post who does not know the Menendezes but has observed the familial fallout of political scandal from the Nixons to the Clintons to the Cuomos to the Trumps.

“When your close loved one is at the center of a political scandal,” she said, “it’s in your obit too.”

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A senator’s wife drew prosecutors’ attention.

Mr. Menendez proposed to Ms. Arslanian that October in India with a grand gesture, singing “Never Enough” from “The Greatest Showman” outside the Taj Mahal. They married a year later and were showered with gifts from a dozen influential friends.

The senator moved into his wife’s modest split-level house in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and they have since attended state dinners at the White House, dining with the president of France and the prime minister of India.

Then their life took a dark turn.

Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, is again on trial, charged with taking part in an elaborate, yearslong bribery scheme. This time there is a volatile new element: charges against his wife.

The case, prosecutors have indicated, is as much about Ms. Menendez as it is about her husband. They have depicted the couple as collaborators who took bribes in exchange for the senator’s willingness to steer weapons and government aid to Egypt, prop up a friend’s halal meat monopoly and meddle in criminal investigations involving allies.

Together, prosecutors contend, Mr. Menendez and his wife were entangled in corrupt schemes that began even before their marriage. The bribes, which included cash and gold bars, helped Mr. and Ms. Menendez live above their lawful means, prosecutors say.

Ms. Menendez, 57, has pleaded not guilty, as has her husband. Her trial was delayed until summer after her lawyers notified the court that she was contending with a serious illness.

Ms. Menendez did not respond to requests for comment. But court records and interviews with her former lawyers, acquaintances and longtime friends show that the years after her 2005 divorce from her previous husband were a time of legal tumult and financial uncertainty.

She relied mainly on alimony and child support, and at one point picked up part-time work as a hostess at a New Jersey restaurant, said Douglas Anton, a lawyer who represented Ms. Menendez in several legal matters.

Mr. Anton, who dated Ms. Menendez before her relationship with Mr. Menendez began, said he had been struck by her sharp intelligence and felt frustrated that she had not pursued a career.

“Just a smart woman,” Mr. Anton said. “Her talents were being wasted.”

As Menendez’s star rose, fears of corruption cast a persistent shadow.

The episode, which Mr. Menendez has used to cast himself as a gutsy Democratic reformer, helped fuel his remarkable rise from a Jersey tenement to the pinnacles of power in Washington as the state’s senior senator. The son of Cuban immigrants, Mr. Menendez broke barriers for Latinos and has used his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to influence presidents and prime ministers.

But those who have closely followed his career say the years he spent enmeshed in Mr. Musto’s machine also set the tone for another, more sinister undercurrent that now threatens to swallow it — one in which Mr. Menendez became a power broker himself whose own close ties to moneyed interests have repeatedly attracted the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

The explosive bribery charges he now faces accuse the senator and his wife of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping increase U.S. assistance to Egypt and trying to throttle a pair of criminal investigations involving New Jersey businessmen. Investigators who searched their suburban home found piles of cash squirreled away, gold bars, and what they described as an ill-gotten Mercedes-Benz.

Interviews with nearly two dozen New Jersey political figures who worked with, watched and fought him, as well as a review of court records stretching back two decades, paint a complicated portrait of a man who has been both a pathbreaking legislator of unusual intelligence and a vindictive politician with a propensity for accepting lavish gifts he could never have afforded on a government salary.

As a measure of how damning the indictment appears, no one — not even a longtime ally recommended by Mr. Menendez’s office — agreed to publicly defend him on the conduct described by prosecutors.

“What we are witnessing is a pattern that developed early and just spun out of control,” said Robert Torricelli, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who served alongside Mr. Menendez in Washington. “People don’t often change. In a lot of ways, Bob Menendez is still a Union City commissioner in the late 1970s.”

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The Menendez indictment set off a political frenzy in New Jersey.

The question was when.

Zack Carroll, who was Mr. Kim’s campaign manager during his first race for Congress in 2018, told the group that a typical campaign launch takes six weeks. “You don’t upset a two-term incumbent by flying by the seat of your pants,” Mr. Carroll said.

Mr. Kim listened quietly. Then he read aloud his campaign announcement.

“What if I were to announce in three hours?” Mr. Kim said.

The announcement, which Mr. Kim posted on social media that afternoon, kicked off perhaps the luckiest Senate campaign in modern New Jersey history. Over the next six months, Mr. Kim went from underdog to front-runner, outmaneuvering Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who joined the race in November and quickly won the support of New Jersey’s powerful Democratic Party machine.

In late March, Mr. Menendez said he would not run in the party’s primary. Three days later, Ms. Murphy ended her campaign.

Mr. Kim is not yet a U.S. senator. There are two other candidates in the Democratic primary and four candidates running on the Republican side, although no Republican has won a Senate seat from New Jersey since 1972. Mr. Menendez has also left open the possibility of running for re-election as an independent in November. But Mr. Kim has now become the odds-on favorite.

In many ways he has benefited from the frustration of Democratic voters, particularly progressive activists, over the state’s machine politics.

“Tammy Murphy represents the arrogance of the party bosses,” said Valerie Huttle, a former New Jersey state assemblywoman who was ostracized from the party after she challenged a boss-endorsed candidate for State Senate in 2021. “That’s what I think helped Andy.”

Along the way, he also won a stunning ruling in federal court, barring party chairs from designing ballots in this June’s Democratic primary that give preferential treatment to their endorsed candidates.

“It is probably the most significant shift in New Jersey politics in decades,” said Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City and a candidate for governor in 2025.

Here’s the latest on the Menendez trial.

Lara Pomerantz, the U.S. prosecutor delivering the government’s opening statement in federal court in Manhattan, said that the case was about a public official “who put his power up for sale.”

Avi Weitzman, the lawyer delivering Mr. Menendez’s opening statement, distilled the senator’s defense into a single line: “Bob was doing his job, and he was doing it right.” He argued that the prosecutor’s case amounted to “speculation and guesswork.”

Mr. Weitzman also attempted to pin blame on the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, who has also been charged in the case. “Let me say this about Nadine: Nadine had financial concerns that she kept from Bob,” he said. He asserted that the senator was unaware of what his wife was up to with the businessmen prosecutors say bribed them.

The charges are among the most serious ever brought against a sitting U.S. senator. The government has accused Mr. Menendez and his wife of conspiring to trade his “influence and power” as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman to foreign powers and New Jersey businessmen in exchange for a Mercedes-Benz convertible, mortgage payments, gold and cash.

Mr. Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, some of which carry up to 20 years in prison.

He is being tried alongside two of the businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. Ms. Menendez, 57, will be tried in July.

The case has already made history. Mr. Menendez is the first senator ever indicted under the foreign agent statute, and the first in the Senate’s 235-year history to be indicted twice in separate bribery cases. His first prosecution ended in a mistrial in 2017.

Here’s what else to know:

• The case has proceeded quickly since the government first brought charges in September 2023. But the trial could be protracted. Judge Stein has laid out a timetable that could run until around July 4.

• In a setback for the senator, Judge Stein issued a ruling on Tuesday precluding his lawyers from presenting testimony from a psychiatrist who had evaluated Mr. Menendez. Her testimony had been expected to address the cash authorities found stockpiled in Mr. Menendez’s home.

• Prosecutors are prepared to detail a list of official actions they say Mr. Menendez traded for bribes. These include ghost writing a letter from Egypt lobbying senators to release military aid; trying to quash criminal cases for Mr. Daibes and another businessman, Jose Uribe; and introducing Mr. Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family who could invest in a real estate development.