Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 24
A New Jersey businessman who prosecutors say bribed Sen. Bob Menendez testified Monday that the Democrat told him in summer 2019 that he’d look into a state criminal probe threatening his business and later assured him there was no threat and boasted about saving him.
At the time, Jose Uribe said in Manhattan federal court, he assumed that Menendez knew he had made a $15,000 down payment and was making monthly payments on a Mercedes-Benz for Menendez’s girlfriend, who married Menendez a year later.
Prosecutors contend that the car, along with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, were bribes paid by three businessmen, including Uribe, to get the senator to use his influence to serve their purposes and earn them money from 2018 to 2023.
Defense lawyers for Menendez have argued that the meeting with Uribe and other evidence cited by prosecutors is nothing more than a senator meeting with constituents and doing what he can to help his state in his role as one of its representatives in Congress.
During Uribe’s two days of testimony, he has described meeting Menendez at a fundraiser he staged that raised $50,000 for the senator’s 2018 campaign, but he said he did not bring up the issue of investigations there or at several other meetings, including a dinner.
He said he thought the issue had already been raised with Menendez by his friend, Wael Hana, a businessman who told him in 2018 that the senator could be enlisted to help his legal troubles go away, but it would cost between $200,000 and $250,000.
Last week, former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal testified that he cut off the senator on a phone call and in an early September 2019 meeting when Menendez tried to raise the subject of a criminal probe.
Uribe said that without his cooperation deal and the leniency expected to come with it, he could face up to 95 years in prison for his crimes.
Source: ABC7 News
