Why Senator Bob “Goldbar” Menendez May Still Skate on Corruption Charges Despite Being a Convicted Felon. Hint: It’s Not Because He’s Innocent.

A cadre of Menendez’s ex-staffers have prospered as lobbyists and political operatives with help from their former boss. They see great promise in his son, freshly minted Congressman Rob Menendez.

Bob Menendez in happier times back in 2015, when he was a powerful, highly regarded member of the Senate, and not the convicted felon he is today. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Following a nine-week trial and three days of deliberations, jurors in the corruption case of Senator Bob Menendez convicted him on Tuesday for taking bribes from intermediaries for the Egyptian and Qatari governments in exchange for promoting their interests in Washington. The New Jersey Democrat, who stepped down as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee last September after the Justice Department announced his indictment, is now looking at a long stretch in prison and expulsion from Congress, where he’s held a seat for the past three decades.

The most damaging evidence against Menendez were gold bars and cash the FBI found at his home during a raid last year, which the government charged were part of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of payoffs he received from the ruling monarchy in Qatar and the Egyptian regime of retired General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power a decade ago after directing a coup against a democratically-elected president affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. His wife Nadine Menendez, who’s also accused of participating in the bribery scheme, had a court date set for later this year, but on Monday New York City Judge Sidney Stein, who presided over the senator’s just concluded case, delayed her trial indefinitely because she’s being treated for cancer. 

Menendez’s legal prospects in the case always looked dim, but he expressed confidence all along he’d be exonerated. His savoir faire was no doubt partly a pose, but he did have some important reasons to be optimistic – two to be precise – though they had nothing to do with evidence his lawyers dug up that raised serious doubts about his guilt. 

The first of the two was that Menendez maintains intimate personal and financial ties with a cadre of former staffers, typically chiefs of staff and campaign fundraisers who were privy to the most sensitive information and assigned the most delicate tasks when they worked for him, whose reluctance to cooperate with the feds in the past helped Menendez skate during two previous federal corruption probes,  when he appeared to be caught just as equally dead to rights with his hand in the cookie jar as he was in the latest case. Prosecutors convinced or coerced one ex-aide of the senator’s to take the stand against him this time, but a number of his close associates who were well placed to know where the relevant bodies were buried didn’t testify at the trial or provide investigators with significant help of any kind, at least as far as can be determined from court records, which was an obstacle to winning a conviction, albeit one the feds were able to overcome. 

That leaves the second reason, which will only come into play when Menendez appeals his conviction, which he’s already said he intends to do, is that since 2017, when his last trial on bribery charges ended in a hung jury, the Supreme Court has effectively legalized and enshrined all but the most brazen acts of corruption, abuses of office and general lawbreaking by political officials, including the egregiously crooked members of the high court itself. The upshot is that Senator Menendez has an excellent chance of having the conviction tossed on appeal.

None of this necessarily means Menendez was definitively guilty as charged during the two earlier probes, however, I’d rate that probability as extraordinarily high as he’s been dogged by credible allegations of illegal self-enrichment throughout the course of his entire 32-year-long congressional career, which commenced in 1993 when he was inaugurated to his first term in the House and for all intents and purposes ended in disgrace with the jury’s verdict. It’s worth reviewing the full record of Menendez’s brushes with federal law enforcement as he’s easily one of the most degenerate lawmakers of modern times, which is saying a lot given the intense competition, and because his darkly amusing story illuminates the complete breakdown of political law and order in the US during recent times. 

It’s also helpful in understanding how a historic grifter such as “Senator Gold Bar” as Menendez has often been referred to since the FBI raided his residence, can thrive and survive under the rules of the contemporary system of governance in the US, aka “the greatest democracy in the world” if you’re credulous enough to believe the lunatics in charge of the nation’s political insane asylum.

A display of the gold bars and other bribes Menendez received that prosecutors presented when they announced his indictment last year. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Menendez’s congressional offices have spawned a veritable cottage industry of lobbyists and political operatives during his long years in federal office. Upon their departure for the private sector, he rewarded many particularly diligent, faithful ex-aides after they by hiring them to do similar work, and paying them a lot better to do it, with donor money. 

Menendez also periodically steered federal contracts and funding their way, and urged his top political and financial backers to send money in their direction as well. In exchange, and that is a fair way to put it, the beneficiaries of his generosity backed his political campaigns with time and money. Whether by chance or more likely by design, this modus operandi helped build and cement strong, fiercely loyal ties between the former staffers and their once and future boss and financial benefactor, which was evident during all three federal investigations of Menendez.

The first of those dates to 2006, when he was making his initial run for the Senate, and was opened by then-US Attorney for New Jersey Chris Christie, who convened a grand jury to investigate a spectacularly profitable real estate investment Menendez made many years earlier. The tale began in 1983, when Menendez bought a house for $92,000 in Union City when he was a member of the Board of Education and three years before he was elected mayor of the notoriously corrupt, mafia-infested town.

In 1994, recently elected US Congressman Menendez leased the property to the North Hudson Community Action Corporation (NHCAC), which used it as its local headquarters. Over the next nine years, the group paid him more than $300,000 in rent for the house, which he sold for $450,000 in 2003 to a convicted felon who helped Union City Treasurer Leonard Grazeola embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars during Menendez’s tenure as mayor.

In one of his stories about the real estate transaction, Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine, whose reporting led Christie to open the investigation, labeled the property a “dump” and estimated the NHCAC had paid Menendez about three times the market rate for rent. The group could afford to pay the premium as Congressman Menendez helped it win millions of dollars in federal funds over the nine-year period it leased it. The NHCAC’s executive director and a number of other employees and officers regularly contributed to Menendez’s campaigns, including board member Maria Almeida, who he hired to manage his New Jersey office and established a tight relationship with.

Meanwhile, the grand jury expanded the scope of its investigation to examine Menendez’s relationship with a number of former aides who had done particularly well for themselves after leaving his employ. Few prospered more than Kay LiCausi, who Congressman Mendnez hired for a low level administrative position in 1998 and worked for him for four years before resigning with his blessing to open a lobbying business called KL Strategies.

Despite its founder’s relatively brief career in politics, KL Strategies was an immediate success, in large part because Menendez paid the company about $120,000 during its first year in business in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts he lined up from his friends and supporters. It didn’t hurt that Congressman Menendez was well positioned to help her clients, and LiCausi – who was widely reported to be his bedroom companion as well as political associate, though neither ever confirmed or denied that – had plenty of face time with the Congressman to advocate on their behalf. 

Profile pic from the current LinkedIn profile of former Menendez staffer-turned lobbyist Kay LiCausi.

Another target of the grand jury was Menendez’s former Chief of Staff Michael Hutton, who resigned around the same time as LiCausi and went to work as a lobbyist as well. His first stop was at Washington-headquartered Bockorny Group, where he was swiftly retained by many New Jersey-based companies. 

In January of 2007, Hutton hosted a bash at a high end Washington restaurant to celebrate the opening of his new firm, Hutton Strategies, and Menendez’s Senate inauguration. He paid for the affair with funds he collected from a mix of multinational giants and state businesses, including Hackensack Meridian Health, the first client he registered to represent after opening the doors at Hutton Strategies, and which he won lavish federal funding for with Menendez’s help.

The grand jury investigation continued on for several years, but in the end neither Menendez nor any of his current or past aides were indicted, despite periodic predictions in the media that charges would be imminently filed. It’s possible the grand jury concluded after gaining access to all the important facts surrounding the real estate case and Menendez’s relationship with his political associates that no one was guilty of wrongdoing. It’s equally possible it never knew exactly what happened because at least some of Menendez’s staffers and employees at the North Hudson Community Action Corporation weren’t thrilled about cooperating with the investigation even after being subpoenaed by the grand jury, as is clear from reading court records and media accounts published at the time.

In late-2011, then-Senator Menendez showed the press a letter stating that all inquiries into his activities had been officially closed. Less than a year later, he was once again under federal scrutiny for allegedly taking bribes from Florida ophthalmologist and suspected Medicare fraudster Salomon Melgen, who was one of his closest companions and top political donors. 

Screenshot from CNN report on Menendez’s trial in 2017 for allegedly taking bribes from Florida ophthalmologist and subsequently convicted Medicare fraudster Salomon Melgen, on left. The prosecution of Menendez ended in a mistrial.

The investigation into Menendez’s relationship with Melgen eventually concluded the senator received more than $1 million in campaign donations and assorted payoffs from his friend for assisting him with his business and personal problems in the US and the Dominican Republic, where the doctor owned an oceanside villa. The two men reportedly used the estate to entertain local ladies and paramours who flew in from the US and other foreign locations on the good doctor’s private jet. 

Menendez, who claimed everything he did for Melgen was due strictly to bonds of friendship, not for crude transactional reasons, obtained tourist visas to the US for three of Melgen’s youthful mistresses from Eastern Europe and Brazil, tried but failed to force the Dominican government to honor a controversial port security contract awarded to a company owned by his benefactor, and used the resources of his office to help the doctor with his problems with Medicare, who he was alleged to have hideously overbilled for a prescription eye medication called Lucentis.

As with the earlier probe, a number of Menendez’s current and former staffers had extensive knowledge about the nature of his relationship with Melgen, but didn’t necessarily share all they knew with a grand jury that was called to look into it or insisted there wasn’t anything improper about their ties despite a vast amount of evidence to the contrary. His New Jersey office manager Maria Almeida, the former NHCAC board member, flew with the senator to the Dominican Republic on Melgen’s private plane for a holiday weekend but based on what I could find in court records and coverage about the case declined to answer some questions when she was called before the Melgen grand jury, including whether she and Menendez were romantic partners. 

Menendez’s Communications Director Patricia Enright, who now works in another office on Capitol Hill, told the grand jury her boss had “the utmost ethics and integrity and trustworthiness.” Melgen made Pedro Pablo Permuy, a former national security adviser for Menendez when he was in the House, a senior executive at his company that had the dubious port security contract. Permuy, who left his job on Menendez’s staff in 2003 to go to work for the lobbying firm of Greenberg Traurig – his colleagues included Jack Abramoff, who went to prison three years later for bribing members of Congress – where he represented a defense contractor who received $3.5 million via an earmark Menendez inserted into an appropriations bill. In 2013, a spokesman for Menendez said the senator was completely "unaware of any involvement” in the port deal by Permuy, which is odd for many reasons, among them that his former staffer had regularly donated to his campaigns since he’d left his employ to become a lobbyist 10 years earlier. 

Ultimately, the grand jury indicted both Menendez and Melgen. During the senator’s trial in 2017, his defense team called to the stand former Deputy Chief of Staff Karissa Willhite, who also had previously worked in New Mexico for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign and raised money for Hillary Clinton’s losing run eight years later. Willhite had moved through the revolving door three years earlier when she left her $150,000-per-year job with Menendez to lobby for Ogilvy Government Relations, but had worked on Medicare-related issues when she was on his staff. 

Willhite, who made three donations totalling $2,500 to Menendez in 2017 in the months before and after her testimony that October, told the court her efforts were purely focused on simplifying the program’s complicated billing procedures and wasn’t connected in any way to tending to the needs of her ex-boss’s ophthalmologist friend in Florida. Prosecutors challenged her testimony with evidence that suggested Menendez’s office closely coordinated its moves with the doctor, including an internal email that reported conversations between his staff and Melgen “every few days;” another the senator sent to a subordinate of Willhite’s with the subject line “Dr. Melgen,” which said, “Please call him ASAP at (redacted phone number) regarding a Medicare problem we have to help him with;” and a copy of “talking points” for a phone call between Menendez and Medicare officials that was drafted by Willhite and other staffers and began, “I was contacted by Dr. Melgen.”

Even more problematic from a conflict-of-interest standpoint was the role of key defense witness Kory Vargas Caro, a former finance director for Menendez who was tasked with hitting up Melgen and his family for campaign cash. Vargas departed Washington in 2013 for Los Angeles, where he co-founded Connectiva, a “Latinx political outreach” firm. During the startup’s four years of operations, Menendez paid the company almost $500,000 from his political accounts, half of all of its revenues during the period. Vargas received the final payment in August of 2017, weeks before he vouched for his former boss’s integrity at the trial, a set of circumstances that a campaign finance and ethics lawyer I interviewed, who spoke off the record, said raised questions regarding possible obstruction of justice on Menendez’s part. 

Three months later, the jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. In 2018, Melgen was sentenced to 17 years in prison for bilking Medicare out of $73 million in fraudulent reimbursements charges. President Donald Trump commuted Melgen’s sentence on his way out the White House door in January of 2021, which multiple sources I spoke to said was done at the request of Jared Kushner, his ardently Zionist son-in-law and senior advisor, as a favor to Menendez, who has long been considered to be one of Israel’s most influential champions in the Democratic Party.

Millionaire New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes, who Nadine Menendez, the senator’s wife and fellow indictee who is set to be tried separately, allegedly thanked for bringing "Christmas in January” by delivering lavish bribes to her and her husband. Daibes was convicted yesterday along with Senator Menendez. Image is a screenshot taken from a 2023 video report by NorthJersey.com.

Similar issues of potential conflicts of interest were at play during Menendez’s just concluded corruption trial. At least three top ex-Menendez staffers worked for Qatar after the bribery scheme got underway in 2020, which surely isn’t a coincidence as the country’s government would have known Menendez was on the payroll and retained firms where his close former staffers worked to enhance the level of communication.

Ogilvy signed a one-year, $240,000 deal with Qatar in February 2021 for “congressional liaison and government affairs,” and assigned Willhite – the senator’s former staffer who’d delivered the right stuff during her trial testimony four years prior – to handle the account along with her colleague Moses Mercado, whose online bio describes him as an “accomplished political organizer who has designed and executed winning strategic plans” for Obama and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, and highlights “a small meeting” he had with Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign to discuss the situation on the battlefield. 

Between 2021 and 2022, when Ogilvy’s work for Qatar ended, Willhite and Mercado worked closely with Menendez’s office while carrying out their lobbying duties, and she donated $7,900 to his campaign. Based on Ogilvy’s lobby disclosure filings, their main contact was the senator’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Kelly, who was named chief of staff last month, which given the jury’s verdict yesterday surely ranks as one of the worst job promotions of all time. In emails to the Ogilvy team, perhaps sent to encourage additional dispensations of campaign cash, Kelly let them know about steps his boss had taken at the Foreign Relations Committee to benefit their client, which in a manner of speaking had the senator on its payroll at the time as well, such as “Chairman Menendez's recognition of Qatar's efforts on helping with refugees.” 

In December of 2021, Qatar bolstered its lobbying efforts by retaining the services of BGR Group, where Menendez’s ex-Chief of Staff Fred Turner had taken a senior executive position earlier that year. The deal netted $30,000 a month for BGR, a Washington bottomfeeder well known for its enthusiastic exertions in polishing the boots of various and sundry foreign dictators and oligarchs, which hadn’t represented Qatar for more than a decade. 

Turner was named one of the capital’s “Top Lobbyists” in 2022 by The Hill and has represented a number of foreign clients, including Donald Guerrero, an auto dealer in Puerto Rico who somehow landed the job of finance minister in the Dominican Republic – a country BGR’s executive would have been quite familiar with thanks to his years on Menendez’s staff – and had been accused by the country’s government of pilferaging about $360 million from the state treasury. Though Turner never registered to lobby for Qatar, his BGR colleagues who managed the account would have been derelict in their duties if they didn’t ask him for advice on lobbying the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. 

I’ve seen no evidence that Turner, Willhite, Kelly or anyone else who worked for Menendez or lobbied for Qatar as the bribery scheme unfolded had direct knowledge about the quid pro quo arrangement he had with the ruling monarchy, however, if they didn’t have suspicions something fishy was going on, it doesn’t reflect well on their general intelligence. Certainly the senator’s top staffers would have been familiar with Fred Daibes, a real estate developer with close ties to members of the Genovese mob family and one of Menendez’s oldest cronies, biggest campaign contributors, and one of his co-defendant in the Qatar-Egypt corruption affair who was also convicted yesterday.

Menendez brokered an introduction between Daibes and a member of Qatar’s royal family who subsequently invested millions of dollars in one of his real estate projects. As a token of his appreciation, Daibes funneled cash, gold bars and other bribes to Menendez from his contacts in the Qatari government, prosecutors charged. His efforts elicited a text message from Nadine Menendez, who wrote to Daibes in early 2002 to thank him for bringing "Christmas in January." 

The only key ex-aide of Menendez’s who testified against him at the trial was his onetime New Jersey state director Michael Soliman, who’s worked for Mercury Public Affairs since 2013, the year after he managed the senator’s reelection run, and continued to be one of his closest political advisers and strategists, including serving as his campaign chairman in 2018, until they parted ways late last year.

Qatar hired Mercury the year after Soliman joined the firm and paid it about $6.3 million between 2014 to 2019 to lobby on bilateral relations with the US, arms sales, and other topics. Soliman was assigned to Mercury's team and lobbied his former office as part of his work, which included helping arrange a much desired meeting between Qatar’s ambassador to the US and Menendez. 

During his time on the stand, Soliman told the court his former boss “was uniquely focused” on squelching a bank fraud case against Daibes, as Politico put it in a story on June 18, the day he testified. To achieve that goal, Menendez decided in late-2020 to push President-elect Biden to appoint his close friend and major fundraiser Philip Sellinger as US Attorney for New Jersey in hopes he’d shut down the Daibes investigation, Soliman testified.

The senator changed his mind and decided to recommend someone else for the job in December of 2020 – the month Menendez began acting as Qatar’s secret agent in Washington in exchange for bribes Daibes was in charge of delivering to him – when Sellinger told him he might have to recuse himself in the case. On the 17th of that month, the day after he got the bad news from Daibes, Menendez texted Soliman, the latter testified, to ask for recommendations about replacements for his first pick for the US Attorney job, but changed his mind again a few months later when he concluded his pal wouldn’t in fact have to recuse himself and urged Biden to nominate him, which he did, and the Senate confirmed Sellinger for the post in December of 2021.

This is not to say any of Menendez’s former or current staffers lied or intentionally withheld damaging information related to the Qatar-Egypt bribery affair. Nevertheless, it’s evident Soliman’s decision to testify bolstered the government’s case and it would have been easier to win a conviction had more of Menendez’s aides and associates done the same.

Even before being convicted on Tuesday, Menendez’s political prospects were inert. After reviewing polls earlier this year that showed an overwhelming slice of his constituents believed he was a crook and hoped to see him booted from office, Menendez dropped out of the New Jersey Democratic Senate primary and announced he’d run for reelection as an independent, though his support has hovered at around five percent so if he carries on with his plan, as he said he would yesterday, it will unfold as the chronicle of a political death foretold.

Menendez’s legal situation isn’t nearly as desperate as it might seem, though. He still stands a good chance of never spending a day in prison as a result of several Supreme Court rulings that have made it extremely difficult to prosecute government officials for corruption and almost impossible to have the verdicts stand up on appeal.

One such decision came on June 26, when the Supreme Court announced a 6-3 decision, with all six conservative justices in the majority, that overturned the conviction of former Portage, Indiana Mayor James Snyder for pocketing $13,000 from a local truck dealership as a reward for steering the business more than $1 million in city contracts. The basis for the ruling, which reverses long standing legal precedent, was that Snyder hadn’t acted corruptly by taking a bribe as a quid pro quo for future actions, but had merely accepted a “gratuity” as a payment in exchange for past actions, which the Court deemed to be entirely different and proper. 

That will be quite helpful to Menendez and his legal team when they start putting together their appeal and even better is the Supreme Court’s ruling to throw out the conviction of onetime Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for taking more than $175,000 in cash, loans and gifts from a businessman who was looking for help with upcoming projects. As McDonnell had sprung into action in pursuit of a payoff for future decisions, he’d be guilty of taking an illegal bribe as defined by last month’s ruling, but the justices determined prosecutors hadn’t proved the moves made by the former governor to benefit the businessman were “official acts,” so they cleared him of wrongdoing nonetheless.

The McDonnell ruling was handed down in 2016 – and the three justices appointed by Democratic presidents were complicit as it was a unanimous decision – the year before the jury deadlocked over the question of whether Menendez was guilty of taking bribes from Dr. Melgen and a mistrial was declared. However, it hadn’t had much of an impact at the time and indeed the judge rejected a plea from the senator’s lawyers that the McDonnell ruling was grounds to dismiss the charges against him.

Since then, the McDonnell decision has been successfully employed by defense attorneys to reverse guilty verdicts in a variety of public corruption cases, including a case the Supreme Court decided last year when overturned the conviction of  Joseph Percoco, the former all-powerful aide of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for accepting $300,000 from executives at companies who did business with the state. 

When added to the effect of other recent decisions by the Supreme Court, the Snyder, McDonnell and Percoco rulings have made it extremely difficult to convict – and uphold – guilty verdicts in political corruption cases. “Thanks to the Supreme Court, it’s become accepted that politics in the US can be openly transactional,” Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer,  former congressional investigator, and expert in public corruption since the 1970s, when he was at the center of the Lockheed bribery probe that led to passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, told me during an interview last week. “Nothing’s corrupt anymore unless the parties negotiated a direct, explicit, defined quid pro quo, so Menendez will have a good chance of winning an appeal.”

Official Photo of Congressman Rob Menendez, the senator’s son, via Wikimedia Commons. Will the apple fall far from the larcenous tree? If it does, is that good or bad? Only time will tell.

Other than Menendez himself, few will be as upset by his conviction than the dear friends and political associates he met along the way. That group includes most of his staffers named in this story, almost all who’ve donated generously to his political treasuries and lined up additional funding from their spouses, relatives and co-workers. 

No one has done more for Menendez in that regard than his onetime Chief of Staff Hutton, who founded his boutique lobby shop in tandem with his former boss’ inauguration to the senate in 2007, which likely gave him the confidence to strike out on his own after working for a big Washington firm for only a few years. Since he left Menendez’s staff two decades ago, Hutton and his wife, Nooshen Amiri, a former Inspector General at the Agriculture Department, have showered him with more than $100,000 in political donations.  

It’s been worth it as Hutton has clients Menendez has been willing and able to lend a hand, at least until his political influence was sharply downsized by his recent legal travails. On that list is Hackensack Meridian Health, Hutton’s very first client when he established his firm 17 years ago and has paid him almost $3 million since then. The company has gotten a good return on its investment, too, with Hutton helping it win at least $212 million in federal funding during the last five years alone, often with pivotal assistance from Menendez. 

While the senator’s downfall is a bitter blow, his associates have known for a long time that terrible day could be coming and have or harbor great hopes for the future in the form of 38-year-old New Jersey Congressman Rob Menendez, who was elected to his father’s old House seat in 2022 and after easily defeating two opponents in last month’s Democratic primary is favored to win his reelection race in November. Menendez Jr.’s political career has been heavily underwritten to date by lobbyists and political operatives, including a group of his father’s former staffers and cronies that includes fellow convicted felon Daibes, Hutton, Permuy, Turner, and Soliman, who has also served as an advisor to the young congressman, though that relationship may end as a result of his testifying for the prosecution in the just-concluded corruption trial. 

For these hardened Washington veterans, there’s no time for sentiment when there’s money to be made, and with the senator removed from the scene, they see Rob Menendez as a man they can do business with going forward. It’s always hard to predict the future, of course, but in a best case scenario, the freshly-minted congressman will follow in his father’s footsteps and become a political leader with the skills, influence, and creativity required to get things done.