NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor accused Sen. Bob Menendez in a closing argument at his bribery trial Monday of putting his power up for sale to benefit three New Jersey businessmen who bribed him with gold, cash and a luxury car.
The presentation by Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni that will continue on Tuesday prompted the Democrat to scoff as he left the courthouse, saying: “The government is intoxicated with their own rhetoric.”
Minutes earlier, Monteleoni urged the Manhattan federal court jury to follow a trail of hundreds of emails and text messages between the businessmen and Menendez and his wife to see the link between the businessmen and the bribe proceeds found in an FBI raid on the Menendez residence in June 2022.
He said they'll also be able to match fingerprint evidence linking the businessmen and Menendez to the bribes, including fingerprints on the tape that bound thousands of dollars in cash hidden in coat pockets, boots and boxes found at the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home owned by his wife, Nadine Menendez.
Monteleoni said the senator “put his power up for sale.”
The prosecutor said it wasn't enough that the senator was one of the most powerful people in Washington as the ranking member and later the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he could block or approve hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to nations such as Egypt.
“He also wanted to use it to pile up riches for himself and his wife,” Monteleoni said.
Monteleoni's closing as the trial enters its ninth week in Manhattan federal court was about half finished when court concluded for the day.
As he left the courthouse, Menendez mocked the prosecutor's closing, saying the government had “spent two hours on charts, not witnesses that came before the jury.”
He added that Monteleoni had spent “two hours telling jurors about what they believe conversations should be that they never heard.”
Monteleoni cited a “clear pattern of corruption” and told jurors to closely review communications between the Menendez couple and the businessmen to see evidence of bribes along with proof that they were trying to cover up their schemes.
Prosecutors say gold bars, over $480,000 in cash and a Mercedes-Benz discovered during the FBI raid are the proceeds of bribes paid to get Menendez to help the men in their business dealings.
Monteleoni said defense claims that gold in the house had mostly been inherited by Nadine Menendez was belied by serial numbers on gold bars that showed they had come from the businessmen who paid bribes.
“All this talk about Nadine having family gold is a distraction,” he said.
In return for bribes, prosecutors say, the senator took actions from 2018 to 2022 to protect or enhance the business interests of the businessmen — including protecting Wael Hana's monopoly over the certification of meat exported to Egypt from the U.S. to ensure it conformed to Islamic dietary requirements.
Besides charges of bribery, extortion, fraud and obstruction of justice, Menendez has also been charged with acting as a foreign agent of Egypt.
Monteleoni said Menendez took bribe-driven actions to benefit Egypt, including speedily clearing nearly $100 million in military aid and demanding that a top U.S. agriculture official stop interfering with Hana's meat-certification monopoly, causing the official to reassure U.S. Embassy workers in Egypt “that he has their back.”
The prosecutor said Menendez also shared sensitive nonpublic information about the number of Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and the number of Egyptians who worked there, knowing it would reach the Egyptians, and helped the Egyptian government prepare its response to U.S. senators critical of its policies.
All the while, Monteleoni said, Menendez was sometimes speaking vaguely in his communications with his wife and the businessmen because, as she knew, he “wants his fingerprints off it” and “they don't want to get caught.”
“He was acting like a bribed man because that's what he was,” the prosecutor said.
Menendez, 70, along with Hana and real estate developer Fred Daibes, have pleaded not guilty and are on trial together. A third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty in the case and testified against the others during the trial, the second the senator has faced in the last decade. None of the defendants testified.
An earlier trial against Menendez in New Jersey ended in 2017 with a deadlocked jury. After the charges were lodged last fall, Menendez was forced to give up his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Nadine Menendez, 57, the senator's wife, is also charged in the case, but her trial has been postponed while she recovers from breast cancer surgery. She also has pleaded not guilty.
As part of his defense, Menendez's lawyers have argued that tens of thousands of dollars in cash found in Bob Menendez's boots and jackets resulted from his habit of storing cash at home after hearing from his family how they escaped Cuba in 1951 with only the cash they had hidden in their home.
Menendez’s lawyers have also asserted that his wife, who began dating the senator in 2018 and married him two years later, kept him in the dark about her financial troubles and assistance she requested from the businessmen.
Menendez was born in Manhattan after the family moved to New York City, though he was raised in the New Jersey cities of Hoboken and Union City, according to testimony by his sister.
Menendez has held public office continuously since 1986, serving as a state legislator before serving 14 years as a U.S. congressman. In 2006, then-Gov. Jon Corzine appointed Menendez to the Senate seat he vacated when he became governor.
Several weeks ago, Menendez filed to run for reelection this year as an independent.
United States Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., center right, leaves federal court following the day's proceedings in his bribery trial, Monday, July 8, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister)
United States Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., leaves federal court following the day's proceedings in his bribery trial, Monday, July 8, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister)
FILE - U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., leaves Manhattan federal court, May, 14, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File)
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV laid out the vision of his papacy Saturday, identifying artificial intelligence as one of the most critical matters facing humanity and vowing to continue with some of the core priorities of Pope Francis.
But in a sign he was making the papacy very much his own, Leo made his first outing since his election to a sanctuary south of Rome that is dedicated to the Madonna and is of particular significance to his Augustinian order and his namesake, Pope Leo XIII.
Townspeople of Genazzano gathered in the square outside the main church housing the Madre del Buon Consiglio (Mother of Good Counsel) sanctuary as Leo greeted them and blessed them. The sanctuary, which is managed by Augustinian friars, has been a place of pilgrimage since the 15th century and the previous Pope Leo elevated it to a minor basilica and expanded the adjacent convent in the early 1900s.
After praying in the church, Leo greeted the crowd and told them they had both a gift and a responsibility in having the Madonna in their midst. He offered a blessing and then got back into the passenger seat of the car, a black Volkswagen, with Vatican security alongside.
The after-lunch outing came after Leo presided over his first formal audience, with the cardinals who elected him pope. In it Leo repeatedly cited Francis and the Argentine pope's own 2013 mission statement, making clear a commitment to making the Catholic Church more inclusive and attentive to the faithful and a church that looks out for the "least and rejected.”
Leo, the first American pope, told the cardinals that he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church. He identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.
Leo referred to AI in explaining the choice of his name: His namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was pope from 1878 to 1903 and laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. He did so most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age. The late pope criticized both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism, giving shape to a distinctly Catholic vein of economic teaching.
In his remarks Saturday, Leo said he identified with his predecessor, who addressed the great social question of the day posed by the industrial revolution in the encyclical.
“In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” he said.
Toward the end of his pontificate, Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it. He warned that such powerful technology risks turning human relations into mere algorithms. Francis brought his message to the Group of Seven industrialized nations when he addressed their summit last year, insisting AI must remain human-centric so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less lethal tools always remain made by humans and not machines.
The late Argentine pope also used his 2024 annual peace message to call for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically, arguing that a technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness is too perilous to develop unchecked.
Francis in many ways saw the Chicago-born Augustinian missionary Robert Prevost as something of an heir apparent: He moved him to take over a small Peruvian diocese in 2014, where Prevost later became bishop and head of the Peruvian bishops conference, and then called him to Rome to take over one of the most important Vatican offices vetting bishop nominations in 2023.
The Vatican revealed Saturday that Leo would retain the motto and coat of arms that he had as bishop of Chiclayo, Peru. The motto, “In Illo uno unum,” was pronounced by St. Augustine in a sermon to explain that “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.”
In the speech, delivered in Italian in the Vatican’s synod hall — not the Apostolic Palace — Leo made repeated references to Francis and the mourning over his death. He held up Francis’ 2013 mission statement, “The Joy of the Gospel,” as something of his own marching orders.
He cited Francis' insistence on the missionary nature of the church and the need to make its leadership more collegial. He cited the need to pay attention to what the faithful say “especially in its most authentic and inclusive forms, especially popular piety.”
Again, referring to Francis' 2013 mission statement, Leo cited the need for the church to express “loving care for the least and rejected” and engage in courageous dialogue with the contemporary world.
Greeted by a standing ovation, Leo read from his prepared text, only looking up occasionally. Even when he first appeared to the world on Thursday night, Leo read from a prepared, handwritten text that he must have drafted sometime before his historic election or the hour or so after. He seemed most comfortable speaking off-the-cuff in the few words he pronounced in Spanish.
Prevost was elected the 267th pontiff on Thursday on the fourth ballot of the conclave, an exceptionally fast outcome given this was the largest and most geographically diverse conclave in history and not all cardinals knew one another before arriving in Rome.
Cardinals have said Prevost did not make any major speech during the pre-conclave discussions, and he carried into the conclave the traditional taboo precluding a pope from the United States given America's superpower status. But Prevost was already known to many.
They said he made an impression in smaller groups where English was the key language of communication in a conclave that brought together 133 cardinals from 70 countries.
Madagascar Cardinal Désiré Tsarahazana told reporters on Saturday that on the final ballot, Prevost had received “more” than 100 votes. That suggests an extraordinary margin, well beyond the two-thirds, or 89 votes, necessary to be elected.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state who had been considered one of the top contenders to be pope, offered his congratulations on Saturday in a letter published in his hometown paper, Il Giornale di Vicenza.
Parolin praised Leo's grasp of today's problems, recalling his first words from the loggia when he spoke of the need for a peace that is "disarmed and disarming." Parolin said he had appreciated Prevost's leadership in Chiclayo, saying he helped handle a particularly thorny problem — with no details — and grew to appreciate his governance more closely at the Vatican handling the bishops' office.
Specifically, Parolin praised Leo's understanding of people and situations, his “calmness in argumentation, balance in proposing solutions, respect, care and love for everyone.”
A vendor sticks pictures of newly elected Pope Leo XIV onto rosaries in a religious souvenir shop in Rome, Saturday, May 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
Pope Leo XIV, left, is flanked by Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza, second from left, after his meeting with the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Vatican Media via AP)
Pope Leo XIV meets the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Vatican Media via AP)
Pope Leo XIV meets the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Vatican Media via AP)
Pope Leo XIV meets the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Vatican Media via AP)
