Senator Bob Menendez (D., NJ) pleaded not guilty Monday to a new indictment charging him with conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent for the Egyptian government.
Federal prosecutors on Oct. 12 accused the New Jersey Democrat — until recently chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — of taking actions from 2018 to 2022 on behalf of military and intelligence officials Egyptians
Menendez entered the plea before U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein in Manhattan.
In a statement dated October 12, Menendez he had said that “piling new charges on top of new charges does not make the allegations true.”
The senator and his wife Nadine Menendez He had previously been accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bullion from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for using his influence to benefit the Egyptian government and interfere with police investigations into the entrepreneurs
All defendants on September 27 pleaded not guilty to those charges. Nadine Menendez and one of the businessmen, Wael Hana, pleaded not guilty to the foreign agent charge on October 18.
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, individuals must register with the department if they are acting as an “agent of a foreign principal”.
Prosecutors said Hana arranged meetings between the senator and Egyptian officials, who pressured him to sign off on military aid. In return, the employer put Nadine Menendez on the payroll of a company he controlled, prosecutors said.
The new indictment named both Hana and Nadine Menendez he communicated to the senator the requests and directives of the Egyptian officials.
Bob Menendez he has resisted calls from his fellow Democrats to resign.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Jonathan Oatis)
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