Armenophile Menendez and Nadine Arslanian: The art of delaying justice The Last Attempts of the Criminal Couple

Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is making a last-ditch bid to get bail while he appeals his federal bribery conviction and 11-year sentence.

If he loses, the disgraced New Jersey Democrat will have to report to prison next Tuesday, June 17, Caliber.Az reports, citing the American website, Courthouse News Service.

Menendez was convicted last year for taking bribes and corruptly acting as an agent for the benefit of foreign interests, including the Egyptian government and the Qatari royal family.

Prosecutors say they found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in Menendez’s New Jersey home, much of it stuffed into clothing embroidered with the senator’s name, as well as gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz — all bribes part of a far-reaching scheme to sell his influence. 

Jurors took just over two days last summer to find Menendez guilty on all 16 counts against him, including bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction of justice. 

Claiming that the verdict has “substantial issues,” Menendez on June 9 asked the Second Circuit to let him out on bail while he fights his conviction in the federal appellate court.

“The defendant does have a right to have those [issues] resolved before serving time for things that may end up being vacated,” Menendez’s lawyer, Meir Feder, argued to a Second Circuit panel.

Feder argued that federal prosecutors pitched their case against Menendez as a “three-legged stool,” where each scheme the ex-senator was accused of “expressly depended on evidence and inferences having to do with the other schemes.”  

On June 9, Feder argued that neither the prosecutors nor Menendez’s trial court “seriously” considered the Speech or Debate Clause, which gives lawmakers immunity from prosecution based on how they vote in the legislature.

Feder added that the lower court erred when it found that Menendez’s conduct was “completely outside of speech or debate protection.” 

He met immediate pushback from U.S. Circuit Judge Steven Menashi, a Donald Trump appointee. “Doesn’t that just follow directly from the Constitution?” Menashi said of the lower court’s ruling.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleone disputed the classification of prosecutors’ case as a “three-legged stool,” telling the circuit panel that it “really has nothing to do with the way that the case was presented to the jury.”

Meanwhile, the American website New Jersey Monitor reported that the wife of former Senator Bob Menendez has asked a federal judge to overturn her bribery conviction, saying prosecutors wrongly forced her to change lawyers less than a year before her trial over a “manufactured” conflict of interest.

Nadine Arslanian Menendez had to hire new attorneys in a hurry last year after prosecutors said they might call attorney David Schertler, who had represented her for nearly two years, as a witness in court.

But prosecutors never called Schertler to the stand during a three-week trial in Manhattan that ended in April, when jurors found Nadine Menendez guilty of accepting bribes, including gold bars, cash, and a luxury car.

Nadine Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced on September 11.

By Khagan Isayev