US District Judge Sidney Stein told prosecutors they could not use text messages from 2019 between an Egyptian official and Sen. Bob Menendez’s co-defendant Wael Hana (D-NJ) due to the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.
The ruling also applies to the 2022 texts between Menendez’s wife Nadine and Hana when she “allegedly forwarded a link to Hana about two military sales to Egypt worth about $2.5 billion, writing, ‘Bob had to sign off on this.'”
No texts could cause problems for the government’s case against Menendez regarding Egypt and military aid. Menendez and his wife Nadine face charges of accepting bribes in exchange for those favors.
From The New York Post:
The exchanges were laid out in a superseding indictment filed by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York this past March.On Sept. 9, 2019, authorities said, an Egyptian official messaged Hana to say he had learned that “senator [sic] Menendize [sic] put an [sic] hold on a billion $ of usaid [sic] to Egypt” and asked “Is this true?”Hana then tried and failed to contact Nadine Menendez before reaching out to another co-defendant, real estate developer Fred Daibes. Daibes apparently got hold of the senator and relayed his response to Hana.“Less than two minutes later,” the indictment reads, “Hana texted [the Egyptian official] writing that it was not true and ‘he’ [Menendez] did not know anything about the hold on U.S. [sic] aid to Egypt.”
Menendez served as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then.
The Speech or Debate Clause is found in Article I, Section 6, Clause 1:
The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
The jury had heard the audio and seen other texts from the seized phones, starting in 2018 when Menendez was cleared of a bribery case.
The texts and audio detail the beginning of Nadine and Bob’s relationship.
Menendez’s defense has pointed the finger to Nadine for all the problems.
The prosecution plans to use the evidence as proof of a “burgeoning, five-year bribery conspiracy” between the senator and his wife:
The messages vividly depict Ms. Menendez as an admirer of the senator and a reliable go-between. Messages she got from Mr. Menendez were rapidly relayed to Mr. Hana — and vice versa, according to the records introduced on Tuesday.In one case, she spoke by phone to Mr. Menendez for 12 minutes. Within two minutes of hanging up with the senator, she texted Mr. Hana: “He said he’s waiting for an answer. As soon as he gets it he will call me.”It was unclear on Tuesday what she was waiting to hear from the senator, but she did have something to offer Mr. Hana, who had founded a halal meat certification company in New Jersey that the next year won a lucrative monopoly with the government of Egypt.“He sent me this information about the American Embassy in Egypt,” she told Mr. Hana.She included the number of Americans and Egyptian employees at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
The judge postponed Nadine’s trial due to her breast cancer diagnosis.
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