FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK – They met in 2018 at a pancake restaurant in Union City, New Jersey. He, Bob Menendez, a sixty-nine-year-old Democratic senator, son of Cuban immigrants, who had been involved in politics since he was twenty and had taken over as head of the Foreign Affairs Commission. She, Nadine Arslanian, an exuberant 56-year-old who was born in Lebanon to Armenian parents.
“He introduced us to the owner,” Nadine told the New York Times. I didn’t know Bob was a senator at the time. She was so smart, she had a great sense of humor and she was very, very sexy. It was a turning point for the finances of Arslanian, divorced and unemployed as her home was in danger of foreclosure. They toured the world, four continents in five months: he proposed to her on Diana’s bench in front of the Taj Mahal and lovingly sang “Never Enough” from the film “The Greatest Showman” to her.
And in fact, according to the indictment published the day before yesterday, there were never enough bribes that the couple received in exchange for favors, particularly from the Egyptian government.
The discovery of thirteen gold bars worth $100,000 in the couple’s home, envelopes containing half a million dollars in cash in the pockets of sweatshirts bearing the senator’s name and a Mercedes given to his wife is a scandal even for New Jersey This is certainly no stranger to corruption cases.
Menendez was forced to leave the leadership of the Foreign Affairs Commission, but he rejects pressure to make him resign: “They have targeted me because they cannot accept that a Latin American from a humble background can become a senator,” he hopes , once again to get away scot-free, as in January 2018, when – a few weeks before his meeting with Arslanian – the jury was divided in a trial in which he was accused of doing a health system favor for a Florida ophthalmologist who allowed him to travel to Paris and the Dominican Republic and financed his election campaign. This time, however, he is not alone.
Shortly after their meeting, it was Arslanian who introduced him to his Egyptian-American entrepreneur friend Wael Hana. According to New York prosecutors, Menendez used his power to influence arms sales in Cairo, as requested by Egyptian officials who used Hana as an intermediary. The woman exchanged emails and text messages with the Egyptians: she informed them of a law signed by her husband on the sale of arms and sent them a letter asking them for funds and confidential information about the employees of the embassy in Cairo should help.
Egypt has long received $1 billion in military aid, but relations have cooled because of human rights abuses and because there are voices in Washington who believe it makes more sense to send weapons elsewhere, such as Taiwan.
The couple deleted messages and emails, but the traces remained, like when the senator searched on Google: “How much is a gold bar worth?” Menendez also allegedly tried to interfere in the judicial investigation of two entrepreneurs from the Hana “network”: Fred Daibes, with ties to the mafia, and Jose Uribe, already convicted of fraud. To intervene in one of these cases, the senator called the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office. And he vowed to push President Biden to appoint a prosecutor he considered “malleable.” He would also put pressure on the Ministry of Agriculture to allow Hana’s company to maintain a monopoly on certifying that halal imported into Egypt is produced in accordance with Islamic law, even if the company has no experience in this regard.
Nadine collected money: She sometimes met callers in a restaurant parking lot to accept cash, but she had a consulting firm dedicated to taking bribes. When the Mercedes arrived, she wrote warmly to Bob: “Congratulations, mon amour de la vie.” But that wasn’t enough: she had gotten a fake job at Hana’s company. She was supposed to be paid without work, but her wages were not received and she complained.