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US senator Robert Menendez has been charged with conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of the Egyptian government, raising the stakes in a criminal case accusing the former chair of the powerful Senate foreign relations committee of accepting bribes to benefit Cairo.
In a superseding indictment filed on Thursday, federal prosecutors allege that Menendez, a Democrat, “provided sensitive US government information and took other steps that secretly aided the government of Egypt”.
The New Jersey senator, his wife Nadine and an Egyptian-American businessman allegedly conspired between 2018 and 2022 to have Menendez act as a foreign agent of the Middle Eastern country, one of the largest recipients of US military aid, according to the court filing.
The country “often faced resistance” in getting more military funding or sales due to lawmakers’ concerns about human rights and democracy, the indictment said. But Menendez “possessed substantial influence over foreign military sales and foreign military financing to Egypt” as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, the filing said.
He exercised that influence on several occasions, prosecutors alleged, including one instance in which he “secretly edited and ghostwrote” a letter on behalf of Egypt asking other senators to lift a hold they had placed on $300mn in aid. An unnamed Egyptian official had requested help drafting the letter, which Nadine Menendez had passed along to the senator, the indictment said.
The latest accusations expand an indictment filed last month that alleged the couple and three New Jersey businessmen had a “corrupt relationship” involving the gifting of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
It piles pressure on to the senator, who has relinquished his role as foreign relations committee chair but has so far resisted mounting calls from Democratic lawmakers to resign.
One of the first lawmakers to call for Menendez’s resignation, John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, on Thursday called for a Senate vote to expel him. “We cannot have an alleged foreign agent in the United States Senate,” Fetterman said in a statement. “This is not a close call.” A two-thirds majority is required to expel a sitting senator.
The charges cast a pall over a high-profile member of the Democratic party who has been on Capitol Hill for decades, serving six terms in the House of Representatives before being appointed to the Senate in 2006.
The senator in a statement said the latest charge flew “in the face of my long record of standing up for human rights and democracy in Egypt and in challenging leaders of that country, including President [Abdel Fattah] El-Sisi, on these issues. I have been, throughout my life, loyal to only one country — the United States of America, the land my family chose to live in democracy and freedom”.
“Piling new charge upon new charge does not make the allegations true,” he added, reiterating his innocence. “The facts haven’t changed, only a new charge. It is an attempt to wear someone down and I will not succumb to this tactic”.
According to the original indictment, Menendez allegedly pressured an official at the Department of Agriculture in order to protect a monopoly linked to the certification of halal food exports that had been granted to a co-defendant by Egypt.
Prosecutors also said the senator had used his influence to hamper a criminal probe and prosecution that the New Jersey attorney-general’s office had initiated against one of the co-defendants’ associates.
The original indictment included photos showing the proceeds of some of the alleged bribes, which were found during a raid on Menendez’s home and safe deposit box last summer. Authorities found more than $480,000 in cash — “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe”, according to the indictment — as well as more than $70,000 in a box belonging to Menendez’s wife.
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