NYT: Lawyers for pro-Armenian Senator Robert Menendez seek to suppress evidence
The initial search of pro-Armenian Senator Robert Menendez’s home occurred on a Thursday morning in June 2022 while the US Senate was in session, Report informs referring to The New York Times.
It was among five searches of Mr. Menendez’s property and electronic devices that judges approved between January 2022 and September 2023 during a federal investigation into the senator, a Democrat from New Jersey, who at the time was chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to a new legal filing.
Information and items collected during the searches later factored heavily in a September indictment in which federal prosecutors charged Mr. Menendez with accepting cash, gold and a luxury car in exchange for political favors.
But late Monday, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers argued that much of what was seized during what they called “exploratory rummaging” should be tossed out. The warrants, they said, were issued by magistrate judges duped by prosecutors who “actively distorted the evidence.”
During the June 16, 2022, search, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation “ransacked” the home, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers wrote. The legal brief does not specify whether it was Menendez’s home in New Jersey or Washington that was raided, but the indictment indicated that a split-level house in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where Mr. Menendez lives with his wife, Nadine Menendez, was searched that day.
Neither Mr. Menendez nor his wife was home, he said in a court declaration. Records show the Senate was in session that day, but it was unclear if Mr. Menendez was in Washington.
Upon returning home, Mr. Menendez wrote, he found that investigators had rifled through filing cabinets, desk drawers, dressers, wardrobes and closets, leaving their contents haphazardly tossed about.
“I was shocked to find my belongings and furniture in complete disarray,” he said.
Agents even broke down unlocked doors, he added.
Agents seized 13 bars of gold bullion, a luxury Mercedes-Benz and more than $550,000 in cash — including tens of thousands of dollars stuffed in envelopes, one of which held the fingerprints of Mr. Menendez and a co-defendant accused of providing bribes, according to the indictment.
That night, prosecutors obtained another warrant to conduct a second home search.
“To obtain several of these search warrants, the government actively distorted the evidence and withheld key exculpatory information, misleading well-meaning magistrate judges into granting warrants that should never have issued,” Mr. Menendez’s lawyers wrote.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment on Tuesday.
The senator, his wife and three businessmen have been charged in an elaborate yearslong bribery conspiracy. All five have pleaded not guilty, and in the last two weeks their lawyers have filed a flurry of legal motions in advance of a trial that is scheduled to start in May.
The grand jury investigation is not over, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said Monday in a letter to the judge.
The senator’s lawyers took no position on whether the redacted material, much of which appeared to present Mr. Menendez in a more favorable light, should be made public.
Their filing on Monday also took direct aim at the government’s motives.
The senator’s lawyers presented the investigation as payback for the Justice Department’s failure to prove earlier charges of corruption against Mr. Menendez, who was indicted in 2015 in New Jersey on unrelated bribery charges. In that case, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, and prosecutors declined to pursue the case after a judge tossed out the most serious charges.
