Gold bars in his closet.
Cash in his boots.
Egypt on speed dial.

The man who ran U.S. foreign policy while Egypt paid his bills.

Bob Menendez had been a fixture of New Jersey Democratic politics since the 1980s. Elected to the House in 1993, appointed and then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, he was a two-term senator serving on the Foreign Relations Committee when he reached its chairmanship in January 2023 — one of the most consequential posts in Congress, with authority over foreign aid packages, arms sales, diplomatic confirmations, and the formal levers of American foreign policy.

Prosecutors would later document that throughout his committee chairmanship — and for years before it — Menendez was using that office not as a public trust, but as a private revenue source. The FBI search of his home in June 2022 found what became one of the most visually striking pieces of evidence in recent American political history: envelopes of cash stuffed into jacket pockets and the toes of boots in his home closet, alongside 13 gold bars.

Cash in boots. Gold in baggies. A Mercedes in the garage.

Between approximately 2018 and 2022, Menendez and his wife Nadine accepted a stream of bribes from three New Jersey businessmen: Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes. According to the DOJ SDNY indictment, the bribe package included:

He chaired the committee that oversees Egypt. Egypt paid him.

The most historically significant charge — and the one that made Menendez a first in American history — was acting as a foreign agent. Under 18 U.S.C. § 219, no public official may act as an agent of a foreign government. No U.S. senator had ever been charged with, let alone convicted of, violating that statute. Menendez broke the record.

Prosecutors documented that Menendez used his Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship to benefit the Egyptian government and its military establishment in multiple concrete ways. He provided Egyptian officials with sensitive, non-public U.S. government information. He communicated with Egyptian intelligence officials through Wael Hana, who held an exclusive halal meat import monopoly that gave him direct financial ties to the Egyptian government. He took steps to influence the U.S. government’s approach to Egypt — including placing holds on competing foreign aid and pressuring other officials — in ways that served Egyptian interests.

The Foreign Relations Committee also had oversight jurisdiction over Qatar. Prosecutors documented that Hana also had business connections to Qatari interests, and that committee actions aligned with foreign beneficiaries’ preferences.

“This has always been about shocking levels of corruption. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes, including gold, cash, and a Mercedes-Benz. This wasn't politics as usual; this was politics for profit.”

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, SDNY — July 16, 2024, following guilty verdict on all 16 counts

FBI agents photographed everything. The photos went viral.

When FBI agents executed a search warrant on Menendez’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey home in June 2022, they systematically documented what they found. The DOJ released those photos alongside the September 2023 indictment, and they became some of the most-viewed evidence photos in recent American political history.

Photos showed: envelopes of cash stuffed into jacket pockets hanging in the bedroom closet; bills inserted into the toes of cowboy-style boots; gold bars stacked on shelves and stored in small baggies; and the Mercedes-Benz convertible in the garage. The serial numbers on the cash traced directly to the three businessman co-defendants. The gold bar serial numbers matched bars documented in a 2013 armed robbery case linked to Daibes.

During trial, prosecutors brought the actual gold bars into the courtroom and passed them to jurors to examine. The physical weight of 13 gold bars — tangible, traceable, and photographed in a sitting senator’s home — made the abstract corruption charge impossible to dismiss as a technicality.

Three men. Three separate schemes. One senator.

Nine weeks of trial. Sixteen counts. Zero acquittals.

The trial before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York ran for nine weeks, beginning in May 2024. Menendez chose to testify in his own defense — an unusual decision in federal criminal trials. He denied the corruption charges and offered innocent explanations for the cash and gold, claiming he kept cash at home due to his family’s distrust of banks rooted in Cuban immigrant history.

The jury rejected that defense on every single count. On July 16, 2024, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all 16 counts: bribery, extortion under color of official right, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and — the historic charge — acting as a foreign agent of the Egyptian government in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 219.

“Today a unanimous jury convicted Robert Menendez on every single count. For years, Menendez was a U.S. senator who wore a jacket of public service but lined its pockets for himself — literally and figuratively.”

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, SDNY — July 16, 2024

From senator to convict: the documented record.

He waited five weeks to resign. Then he got 11 years.

After the July 16 guilty verdict, Menendez did not immediately resign his Senate seat. He announced in August that he would resign, and his resignation became effective August 20, 2024 — five weeks after conviction. He had refused Democratic leadership calls to resign even after the indictment in September 2023, and ran — and lost — as an independent candidate in the 2024 New Jersey Senate primary.

On January 30, 2025, Judge Stein sentenced Menendez to 11 years in federal prison. His wife Nadine Menendez, who was separately tried and convicted, was sentenced to 54 months. Co-conspirators Wael Hana and Fred Daibes received more than eight years and seven years, respectively.