And this is a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Damien Williams and I'm the United States attorney here in the Southern District of New York. Today, I'm announcing that my office has obtained a three count indictment charging Senator Robert Menendez, his wife, Nadine Menendez, and three New Jersey businessmen, while Hannah Jose Uribe and Fred Davis for bribery offenses. The investigation that led to these charges has been run out of the Southern District of New York The indictment alleges that between 2018 and 2022, Senator Menendez, the senior U.S. senator from New Jersey and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, engaged in a corrupt relationship with Hanna Uribe and Debbie's The indictment alleges that through that relationship, the senator and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for Senator Menendez using his power and influence to protect and to enrich those businessmen and to benefit the government of Egypt. The indictment alleges that Hannah Uribe and Davies provided bribes in the form of cash, gold, home mortgage payments, a low show or no show, a job for Nadine Menendez, a Mercedes Benz and other things of value to the senator and his wife. Now, constituent service is part of any legislators job. Senator Menendez is no different. And as we explained in the indictment, there are things that Senator Menendez says he can do for his constituents and things that he says he cannot do for his constituents. He put it all on his Senate website. So, for instance, it says he cannot compel an agency to act in someone's favor. It says he cannot influence matters involving a private business. It says he cannot get involved in criminal matters or cases, period. But we allege that behind the scenes, Senator Menendez was doing those things for certain people, the people who were bribing him and his wife. And let me say a little bit more about the conduct that's alleged in the indictment. The indictment alleges that Senator Menendez took several actions as part of this corrupt relationship. First, the indictment alleges that Senator Menendez used his power and influence, including his leadership role on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit the government of Egypt in various ways. Among other actions, Senator Menendez allegedly provided sensitive, nonpublic U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and otherwise took steps to secretly aid the government of Egypt. We also allege that Senator Menendez improperly pressured a senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to protect a lucrative monopoly that the government of Egypt had awarded to HANA, a lucrative monopoly that Hana then used to fund certain bribe payments Second, the indictment alleges that Senator Menendez used his power and influence to try to disrupt a criminal investigation and prosecution undertaken by the New Jersey Attorney General's office related to an associate and a relative of Uribe. Third, the indictment alleges that Senator Menendez used his power and influence to try to disrupt a federal prosecution of abuse in the district of New Jersey in two ways First, by seeking to install a United States attorney who he thought could be influence with respect to Davies. And second, by trying to influence that office to act favorably in Debbie's case. And as we allege in the indictment, the senator agreed to do these things and use his power in this way because Hanna was paying bribes, because Uribe was paying bribes and because Davies was paying bribes. Fortunately, the public officials the senator sought to influence did not bend to the pressure. That's a good thing. That was part of this investigation. Special agents with the FBI executed search warrants on the residence and safe deposit box of Senator Menendez and named Menendez in New Jersey. When they got there, they discovered approximately $500,000 of cash stuffed into envelopes and closets. Some of the cash was stuffed in the senator's jacket pockets. Some of the cash, some of the envelopes of cash contain David's fingerprints, Darby's DNA. That's not all. Agents also discovered a lot of gold, gold that was provided by Davies and Hanna. And the FBI, of course, found the Mercedes Benz that Uribe had provided them of. The items that that being covered are discussed in the indictment, which I encourage all of you to read carefully. Let's take a look at just some of the items so as you can see here, this is the Mercedes Benz that we allege that Uribe provided as part of the scheme. What you see here are three kilograms of gold. These three kilograms together are worth approximately $150,000. And of course, here you can see just a fraction of the cash that was uncovered as part of the scheme. Now, I want to make a couple of things very clear. First, my office remains firmly committed to rooting out public corruption without fear or favor and without any regard to partizan politics. That's in our DNA. Always has been, always will be. And second, this investigation is very much ongoing. We are not done. And I want to encourage anyone with information to come forward and to come forward quickly. And they can do that by reaching out to the FBI. Tip line one 800 call FBI Now, a case of this magnitude requires tremendous partnership. And I want to thank our partners at the FBI who have been with us since day one and have been absolutely incredible every step along the way. I also want to thank our partners at the IRS for their assistance in this investigation. I want to thank our colleagues from around the Department of Justice, who are far too many to name here and to think specifically. But they have also been invaluable. And, of course, I want to thank the career prosecutors from my office who are handling this investigation. They have done tremendous work Eli, Marc, Laura Pomerantz, Dan Rich, Anthony, Paul Monteleone and their supervisors, Rebecca, Donna Luskin, Maureen Comey, the chief of our office's public corruption unit. I now want to invite up to the podium FBI assistant director in charge, James Smith. Jim, good morning. So I'm not going to go any further into the case, as U.S. Attorney Damien Williams explained. But what I want to talk about more or less is, hey, the FBI's public corruption excuse me, the FBI investigating public corruption is one of our top priorities, and we will continue to investigate public corruption cases. I want to thank the agents, the team over here from the FBI, the IRS for their hard work into this investigation. They've spent many hours and days and weeks and months working this investigation. I would also like to thank all the prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, like to thank Damien Williams for his support in this particular case. I would like to thank the IRS for all their investigators who worked tirelessly along with the team here to investigate this case. And I would also finally like to thank the DOJ's Public Integrity section. So thank you very much for all your support in this All right. Thank you, everyone. Let's talk more about this, Elliot Williams. Talk to me about your reaction to this specifically. I'm really interested in we're talking about a sitting U.S. senator who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And you're talking about you just heard a U.S. attorney say that he was working to benefit the government of Egypt All right. Not good. And moreover, what's interesting is the manner in which the exchange of favors, if you want to call them that plays out is often through his wife. The way the indictment is structured. There are a number of statements and communications made between Senator Menendez and his wife and alleged allegedly between him and his wife and some of the other people who are charged that that lead to these actions that the that the prosecutors are saying that Senator Menendez engaged in. But it's incredibly serious when you are speaking of nonpublic information being provided to foreign actors. A point I noted in our earlier segment was the fact that at least one of these conversations that they recount is a phone call that happens to two officials, I believe might have even been Egyptian officials directly outside of the presence of Senator Menendez and staff. Now, look, as a former Senate staffer, I can tell you, you can't always control what the boss is doing. Sometimes you'll pick up the phone and place phone calls and so on. This goes beyond that when you're talking about, number one, the seriousness of it. And number two, the allegation that he was being directed to do so or at least being compensated or reimbursed for his doing so. That that that really jumped out to me and is itself something that prosecutors, I'm certain, would hammer in front of the jury as very suspicious conduct from someone. As you said, Kate has an official position and has people around him that ought to be or, you know, probably were attempting to protect him from engaging in conduct like this.
