Sen. Bob Menendez pressured former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to talk about an ongoing criminal investigation during a 2019 meeting, in what prosecutors called “egregious” behavior, a court heard Thursday.
“I can’t talk about this,” Grewal, testifying at his federal bribery trial in Manhattan, recalled telling the then-powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Grewal told jurors that Menendez, 70, asked him to discuss a “pending criminal case” during a Sept. 6, 2019, interview at the veteran Democrat’s Newark offices.
After the meeting, Grewal’s aide, Andrew Brook, joked “Wow, that was gross” outside Menendez’s office before the two men got into a waiting car, Grewal testified.
According to Grewal’s testimony, Menendez tried to bring up a specific incident during the 10- to 15-minute interview after complaining to Grewal, without providing any evidence, that New Jersey insurance fraud authorities were unfairly targeting Hispanic defendants.
Grewal told jurors he ended the conversation after Menendez confirmed he wanted to discuss a specific incident, which Grewal thought was inappropriate.
The former attorney general said he told Menendez that lawyers for those under investigation should contact the lawyer in charge of the investigation.
The senator testified that he never actually “specifically asked” Grewal to drop the investigation, but he said his “impression was that he didn’t like the way it was being conducted.”
Grewal, 50, who now heads the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, added that Menendez had called him on his cellphone several months earlier and raised the same issue of alleged mistreatment of Hispanic defendants, again without providing evidence.
Federal authorities say the senator’s concerns about insurance fraud were no coincidence.
A few months before the Newark meeting, in April 2019, a former insurance agent named Jose Uribe handed Menendez’s wife, Nadine, $15,000 in cash as a down payment on a Mercedes-Benz C-Class convertible.
As part of his plea agreement, Uribe admitted to making the payment to lobby a prominent lawmaker to protect one of his associates from a state insurance fraud investigation.
“I knew it was wrong to offer a car to a United States senator in exchange for lobbying him to drop a criminal investigation, and I deeply regret my actions,” he said at his March hearing.
After finalizing the purchase of the convertible, Nadine messaged her husband, “Congratulations, my love. We are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” and called him “the love of my life” in French. According to the indictment, she also sent the senator a photo of the luxury car along with a heart emoji.
Uribe is expected to take the stand as a government witness at some point on Friday, after prosecutors first call an FBI fingerprint expert as a witness.
Menendez, wearing a dark blue suit and pink tie, remained calm throughout Grewal’s testimony, occasionally chatting with his lawyer, Adam Fee, and passing notes.
If convicted on all broad bribery charges that accused him of accepting Mercedes, gold bars and cash in exchange for favors to a New Jersey businessman and the governments of Egypt and Qatar, he could face decades in prison.
He maintains his innocence and laid out a remarkable defense in his opening statement last month, blaming his wife for the gold bars and claiming that she had hidden them without his knowledge.
