When Senator Robert Menendez was charged final yr with collaborating in a fancy bribery scheme, information headlines highlighted a peculiar element: Investigators had found $480,000 in money and 13 bars of gold throughout a search of his home in New Jersey.
Days later, the senator supplied a proof for the money, saying he routinely withdrew massive sums of cash from his financial savings account, a customized he mentioned he had realized from his Cuban immigrant mother and father.
Now, Mr. Menendez’s legal professionals have gone additional, asserting that the behavior was rooted in deep psychological trauma tied to his father’s suicide and a household historical past of confiscated property in Cuba.
They need a psychiatrist who has evaluated Mr. Menendez, 70, to testify on the senator’s trial about what they’ve described as “traumatic experiences in his previous related to money and funds.”
Mr. Menendez’s father was a compulsive gambler who died by suicide after Mr. Menendez “determined to discontinue paying off his father’s playing money owed,” the senator’s legal professionals mentioned in a current letter to the federal government describing the psychiatrist’s findings.
The psychiatrist’s conclusions had been disclosed for the primary time late Wednesday in a authorities courtroom submitting that included the letter. Within the submitting, the workplace of Damian Williams, the U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of New York, requested a choose to bar the psychiatrist, Karen B. Rosenbaum, from testifying on the senator’s trial.
The dispute over Dr. Rosenbaum’s potential testimony comes lower than two weeks earlier than the beginning of Mr. Menendez’s broadly anticipated trial in Manhattan on federal corruption fees.
Dr. Rosenbaum would testify that Mr. Menendez’s father’s dying and his mother and father’ historical past as Cuban refugees left him with a “worry of shortage” that led to a “longstanding coping mechanism of routinely withdrawing and storing money in his dwelling,” the senator’s legal professionals, Adam Charge and Avi Weitzman, wrote.
The prosecutors, in asking the choose, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Courtroom, to bar the testimony, mentioned Dr. Rosenbaum’s opinion “doesn’t seem like the product of any dependable scientific precept or methodology.”
In addition they argued that having the physician testify seemed to be an effort by Mr. Menendez to current alleged info earlier than the jury with out subjecting himself to cross-examination by testifying himself.
They mentioned that, at a minimal, if Decide Stein had been inclined to permit Dr. Rosenbaum to testify, the prosecution ought to have the ability to have the senator examined by a psychiatrist retained by the federal government.
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat and former chairman of the highly effective Senate Overseas Relations Committee, is accused of accepting bribes in change for his willingness to make use of his affect to assist allies in New Jersey and to assist the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
He might be tried with two New Jersey businessmen who additionally had been accused of collaborating within the bribery conspiracy. The senator’s spouse, Nadine Menendez, was charged as effectively however granted a separate trial, in July, after her legal professionals mentioned she had a critical medical situation that might require surgical procedure and an prolonged interval of restoration.
All 4 defendants have pleaded not responsible.
The indictment, which runs 66 pages, outlines a wide range of schemes. However maybe nothing has caught the general public eye as a lot as its descriptions of the money, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz convertible discovered throughout a June 2022 search of the senator’s dwelling in Edgewood Cliffs, N.J.
Investigators found a lot of the money stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothes, footwear, a duffel bag and a secure, in response to authorized filings.
After being charged in September, Mr. Menendez supplied what he referred to as an “old style” clarification for not less than among the money found within the search. He mentioned that for 30 years he had withdrawn cash every week from his financial savings account for “emergencies.”
He instructed reporters that he did this “due to the historical past of my household going through confiscation in Cuba.”
Prosecutors, nevertheless, have mentioned that among the money found in the home was wrapped in bands exhibiting it had been withdrawn, not less than $10,000 at a time, from a financial institution the place neither Mr. Menendez nor his spouse had an account. This was a sign “that the cash had been supplied to them by one other particular person,” they wrote in courtroom papers.
Mr. Menendez was born in New York Metropolis in 1954 to oldsters who had fled Cuba within the years earlier than Fidel Castro seized management of the nation. He has talked and written about rising up in a tenement condominium in Union Metropolis, a densely packed group in northern New Jersey that grew to become a magnet for refugees of the Cuban diaspora.
Mr. Menendez was 23 when his father, a carpenter, died, he instructed The New York Occasions in 2005. His mom was a seamstress.
