It’s not hard to figure this one out, Save Jerseyans…
Prosecutors are asking U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein to deny a Menendez defense team request to push his corruption trial into the summer; the senior U.S. Senator from New Jersey’s charges ranging from working as an unregistered foreign agent and accepting bribes including in the form of gold bars are currently set to go before a jury in May, mere weeks before the state’s U.S. Senate Primary. Menendez’s attorneys are arguing that 6.7 million documents require additional time for review.
“The current schedule set by the court is expedited, but reasonable,” wrote U.S. Attorney Damian Wiliams for the Southern District of New York. “Nothing in the defendant’s request for an adjournment, made more than two months after the schedule was set, justifies a material deviation from this considered schedule.”
Citing “good-faith efforts to facilitate the defense’s efficient review,” prosecutors added that “[t]he government has taken great pains to organize the discovery and to assist counsel’s review of it.”
“Other assertions regarding the amount of time they allegedly need – such as their desire to take unspecified investigative steps, their plan to file a challenge to the sufficiency of the indictment, their desire to mount a constitutional challenge to a federal criminal statute, and their plan to file suppression motions – are not unique to this case and do not justify a multiple-month adjournment,” the government added.
The charges facing Menendez, his wife Nadine, Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes were first announced back in September.
Meanwhile, Menendez faces next-to-impossible odds in the Democrat Primary as the party establishment continues to circle its wagons around Tammy Murphy, wife of the incumbent governor. U.S. Congressman Andy Kim is also contesting the nomination. The Republican field is still evolving, but the GOP hasn’t elected a New Jersey U.S. Senator since before Watergate.
