The Menendez trial is taking a week-long break, Save Jerseyans, after jurors were treated Tuesday to additional testimony from attorney John Moldovan who discussed the Democrat’s allegedly corrupt relationship with his client (halal company owner Wael Hana), one of three businessman from whom Menendez stands accused of accepting bribes in exchange for favors. The feds also say Menendez aided Egypt and Qatar as an unregistered agent. Moldovan told the court that Hana paid off Menendez’s wife’s home but that the gift was disguised as a loan. Menendez himself aided Hana’s company lock down an Egyptian halal monopoly. How? By ensuring that Egyptian halal exported to the United States would need to be signed off on by Hana’s company.
Damning stuff and near impossible to disguise with a good faith explanation. He’s trying anyway. Senator Menendez’s incredible core defense strategy remains blaming his wife and co-defendant, Nadine Arslanian, whose own trial was delayed by a breast cancer diagnosis. Defense attorney Avi Weitzman of the New York firm Paul Hastings even claimed that hoarding gold is a cultural thing for Mrs. Menendez.
Is she part dragon? A distant descendant of Rumpelstiltskin? Unclear. But while Team Menendez continues to insist that Arslanian accrued a small fortune in treasure without her famous husband’s knowledge, Weitzman continued to argue that Menendez is a hoarder, too, because his family had a rough time under Castro long ago in Cuba. His family. Nevermind that Menendez was born in New York.
Contradictions in strategy aside, we need to consider whether it was possible that Menendez’s wife could’ve hid her financial distress and sought large payouts and luxury goodies from friends and contacts without her husband knowing.
It doesn’t seem likely, and it’s even less clear how she could’ve really hid the evidence without Bob noticing. Jurors have already seen an album’s worth of photographs revealing a boatload of money – to be specific, $600,000 in cash and gold – jammed into closets and hidden in barbecue gills as well as crammed into articles of clothing. There were STACKS of cash in a Timberland boot (see above)!
My wife couldn’t hide $480,000 in currency without me knowing about it. I sure couldn’t get away with something like that without her finding out. And the Menendez couple don’t live in a mansion in which he’d be easy to conceal a pirate captain’s bounty.
Who knows… maybe Senator Menendez’s decision to throw his wife under the bus will pay off with an acquittal. But to get by the jury, the reputationally shrewd Menendez may need to explain how he missed $600,000 in stuff laying around his house. Can he?
