Bob Menendez’s sister to testify at bribery trial about ‘family history’ of stashing cash
Squirreling away boatloads of cash — it’s all in the Menendez familia.
Sen. Bob Menendez’s hoarding of cash in his New Jersey home isn’t evidence of a crime — but merely an innocent part of his Cuban family’s tradition, the embattled Democrat’s sister is expected to tell jurors at his federal bribery trial.
The Garden State senior senator’s older sister plans to testify to his “personal and family history of storing cash outside of banks” soon after his defense case kicks off Monday in Manhattan federal court, Menendez’s attorneys said.
The veteran lawmaker’s kin is expected to explain that Menendez had a habit of stashing cash in his home and office because of a family tradition of distrusting banks after their parents left Cuba and lost their life savings before raising them in a Union City tenement, a court filing shows.
Menendez’s sister could testify as early as Monday.
Prosecutors rested their case Friday after detailing an alleged scheme in which the senator, 70, and his wife Nadine Menendez are accused of accepting more than $150,000 in gold bars, $566,000 in cash payments and other gifts in exchange for favors to local businessmen and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Jurors at the trial saw photos of stacks of bills and gold bars — including some stuffed inside a well-worn Timberland work boot — stashed around the couple’s cluttered Englewood Cliffs house when the FBI raided it in June 2022.
Witnesses called by federal prosecutors during the six-week trial included New Jersey insurance broker Jose Uribe, who testified that he bought Nadine a new Mercedes in exchange for help killing a state criminal probe.
“I saved your ass, not once but twice,” Bob Menendez bragged to the businessman during one of several meetings at swanky New Jersey restaurants, Uribe told jurors.
Menendez’s lawyers have attempted to shift blame for the alleged scheme away from the senator and toward his “dazzling, tall” wife, who they claimed in last month’s opening statements stashed the gold bar trove away in her closet without his knowing.
Defense attorneys had also planned to call an expert witness psychiatrist to the stand to testify that Menendez kept large piles of cash in his home because of finances-related “intergenerational trauma” rooted in his father’s suicide over gambling debts, court papers show.
But Judge Sidney Stein ruled before the trial kicked off that Dr. Karen Rosenbaum could not testify.
As of Friday afternoon, it was unclear whether Menendez would take the stand.
“The government has not proven its case,” the senator huffed on his way out of the Lower Manhattan courthouse Friday afternoon.
Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty, stepped down from his post chairing the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee in the wake of his September 2023 indictment, but has refused to resign from Congress.
