New Jersey Democrat Menendez is accused of accepting bribes of gold and cash and he is also charged with acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. He is on trial with 2 of the men who allegedly paid him bribes.
Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, went on trial in Manhattan federal court Monday, accused of accepting bribes of gold and cash to use his influence to deliver favours that would help three New Jersey businessmen.
Menendez, 70, sat with his lawyers and listened as Judge Sidney H Stein told several dozen prospective jurors about the charges against Menendez and two of the businessmen.
The judge told them the “sitting US senator from the state of New Jersey” had been charged in a conspiracy in which he allegedly “agreed to accept bribes and accepted bribes”.
After he warned them that the trial was expected to last up to seven weeks, Stein let jurors raise their hands if they believed they could not serve for that length of time. Then, he took them one at a time into a separate room to ask them why.
Menendez, wearing a suit with a red tie, was dropped off in front of a Manhattan federal courthouse at 8:15am, forty minutes before former US president Donald Trump’s motorcade passed by on its way across the street to state court, where he is on trial for allegedly falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn actor before the 2016 election.
Menendez did not speak to reporters who were kept behind barricades as he entered a security pavilion where everyone entering the courthouse is scanned.
