Sen. Bob Menendez facing new charges of acting as a foreign agent for Egypt

Federal prosecutors filed new charges Thursday against U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) accusing the former head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee of acting as an unregistered agent for Egypt.

In a superseding indictment handed down by a grand jury in Manhattan, they alleged that in exchange for bribes the three-term Democrat provided “sensitive U.S. government information” that made its way into the hands of Egyptian military and intelligence officials.

They also accused Menendez, 69, of taking other steps to secretly aid the country’s government, including ghostwriting a 2018 letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in aid.

» READ MORE: From gold bars to pricey cars: All the bribes Sen. Bob Menendez has been accused of taking over the years

Menendez, responding to the new charges Thursday, said in a statement that they flew “in the face of my long record standing up for human rights and democracy in Egypt and in challenging leaders of that country.”

“I have been, throughout my life, loyal to only one country — the United States of America,” the senator said. “Piling new charge upon new charge does not make the allegations true ... I again ask people who know me and my record to give me the chance to present my defense and show my innocence.”

But prosecutors maintain that many of Menendez’s positions toward Egypt were bought with gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — including gold bars, cash-stuffed envelopes, and a Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000.

The new charge only deepens the legal peril Menendez faces five years after he escaped a previous bribery case and as he has remained defiant amid calls for his resignation while he fights the latest case.

» READ MORE: Sen. Bob Menendez beat federal bribery charges before. Here’s why this time is ‘different from top to bottom’

More than 30 Senate Democrats, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, have urged him to step down and the new charges only renewed that sentiment. U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) in a statement Thursday pushed his colleagues to vote to expel Menendez because “we cannot have an alleged foreign agent in the United States Senate.”

But Menendez has refused to resign and has not ruled out running for a fourth term next year.

The new charges also raises questions about Menendez’s long tenure as both the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an influential body overseeing foreign-policy legislation and debate in Congress.

He resigned his position as chairman of the committee after he was first indicted last month, as required by Senate rules. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), chairman of the committee’s Middle East subcommittee, has called for a complete reexamination of the $235 million in U.S. military aid to Cairo.

“I would hope that our committee would consider using any ability it has to put a pause on those dollars, pending an inquiry into what Egypt was doing,” he said.

The earlier indictment accused Menendez alongside his wife, Nadine Arslanian, of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from three New Jersey businessmen between 2018 and 2022 in exchange for using his power and influence to protect and enrich them.

The only new charge levied against Menendez and Arslanian in the superseding indictment filed Thursday is a single count of conspiracy for a public official to act as a foreign agent, which carries a maximum prison term of up to five years.

» READ MORE: Who is Bob Menendez’s wife, Nadine? Who else was charged in the indictment?

In laying out their case, prosecutors said Thursday that Menendez was fully aware of the laws requiring the registration of foreign agents working in the United States and statutes barring members of Congress from accepting payment to act on behalf of other governments.

As a senator, they wrote in the indictment, Menendez “made multiple requests for the U.S. Justice Department to commence an investigation against another person for failing to register” under those laws.

Authorities provided few details on that incident in the new indictment.

But the information match a series of letters that Menendez sent to Justice Department officials in 2019 and again last year advocating for an investigation of former U.S. Rep. David Rivera (R., Fla.), who has since been charged with acting as an agent of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

“If Rivera carried out work that requires registration … it is imperative that the Justice Department ensure he is held to account,” Menendez wrote in one of those letters last year that remains posted on his senate website.

But even as he was carrying out that campaign, authorities say, Menendez was engaging in paid advocacy on Egypt’s behalf.

Many of their allegations supporting that claim involve one of the businessmen charged with Menendez in the earlier indictment — Wael Hana, the Egyptian-born head of a halal meat certification company.

Over several years, the document says, Hana, a close friend of Arslanian’s, worked to introduce Menendez to Egyptian and military officials.

In exchange for Menendez’s pledge to facilitate military sales and financing to Egypt, Hana promised to give the senator’s wife a no-show job and other gifts including gold bars, two exercise machines, an air purifier and $23,000 in mortgage payments on Arslanian’s Bergen County condo, prosecutors say.

In 2018, prosecutors say Menendez leaked a list of U.S. Embassy personnel in Egypt to his wife, who later it passed it on to Hana. Such information, while not classified, is considered highly sensitive and is routinely kept out of reach of foreign governments.

Prosecutors also say Menendez weighed in to protect a monopoly the Egyptian government had granted Hana’s company as the lone certifier of halal meat exports from the United States.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture pressured the Egyptian government in 2019 to withdraw the monopoly, arguing it was hurting U.S. businesses, prosecutors say Menendez pressed officials there to drop their criticism.

The only new allegation that appears in Thursday’s indictment involves a 2019 meeting Menendez hosted with Hana and an unnamed Egyptian intelligence official in Washington, in which the men discussed criticism the country was receiving from members of Congress over a 2015 Egyptian military airstrike that left a U.S. citizen injured.

Some members of Congress had concluded that Egypt hadn’t made good on calls to provide the victim with fair compensation and were threatening to withhold future U.S. aid.

A week after that meeting, the intelligence official allegedly texted Hana, saying that if Menendez helped resolve the matter “he will sit very comfortable.”

Hana, according to the indictment, replied: “Orders. Consider it done.”

Hana’s attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, balked in an email Thursday at prosecutors’ assertion that his client’s relationship to the senator amounted to anything nefarious.

“As with the other charges in this indictment,” he wrote, “Mr. Hana will vigorously defend against this new and baseless allegation.”

Read the superseding indictment: