New Jersey businessman who pleaded guilty to trying to bribe Sen. Bob Menendez with Mercedes to testify in corruption trial

washington — A key witness in the Senator Bob Menendez corruption trial is expected to testify Friday about what he says was an attempt to bribe the New Jersey Democrat by purchasing his wife, Nadine Menéndeza new Mercedes-Benz convertible.

José Uribe, a New Jersey insurance broker who was indicted with Menéndez, pleaded guilty in March and confessed to buying a $60,000 luxury car to influence the senator. He is cooperating with prosecutors.

During the March hearing, Uribe said he conspired with the senator’s wife and others to buy her car in exchange for her husband, “using his power and influence as a United States Senator to obtain a favorable outcome and stop all related investigations to one of my associates”, according to the Associated Press.

He also told the judge he wanted to stop a “possible investigation into another person I considered a member of my family,” adding that he hid his involvement in the car payments “because I knew it was wrong.”

Throughout the senator’s corruption trial, which is in its fourth week, prosecutors have used text messagesemails, voicemails and financial records to portray the senator and his wife as collaborators in a complex bribery scheme that involved a halal meat monopoly, the Egyptian and Qatari governments and the attempt to influence several criminal investigations.

The senator is on trial alongside two New Jersey businessmen – Wael Hana, owner of a halal certification startup, and Fred Daibes, a real estate developer. All three pleaded not guilty. Nadine Menendez’s trial has been postponed until later this summer as She is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She pleaded not guilty.

Hana connected Uribe to the couple after Nadine Menendez was involved in a car accident that killed a pedestrian in December 2018. Nadine Menendez, who was not charged in the death, complained to Hana about not having a car after the accident, according to the messages text presented by prosecutors as evidence.

Meanwhile, Uribe was desperate to help a business associate accused of insurance fraud and an employee who was under investigation, according to prosecutors.

In January 2019, prosecutors say, the senator called the New Jersey attorney general to try to stop the insurance fraud case. The supposed interference, however, did not work and Uribe’s business partner ended up pleading guilty. But the investigation into Uribe’s employee, who he said he considered a family member, continued.

Uribe and Nadine Menendez reached an agreement that he would buy her the car she needed and the senator, whom she would marry the following year, would try to shut down the investigation, prosecutors say.

Nadine Menendez received her new car in early April 2019 after meeting Uribe in a restaurant parking lot, where he gave her $15,000 in cash as a down payment, according to the charges.

“Congratulations, mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” she reportedly texted the senator.

Uribe later arranged to pay for the car by texting an associate: “I don’t want to use anything with my name on it,” according to messages prosecutors showed jurors.

After the FBI searched their house in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in June 2022, where agents discovered piles of money, gold bars and Mercedes, Nadine Menendez and Uribe met to discuss what he would say if asked about the car payments, according to what he told the court when he pleaded guilty.

“I told her that I would say that a good friend of mine was financially stable and I was helping that friend make her car payments, and when she was financially stable, she would pay me. ‘That sounds good,'” Uribe told the judge in March, according to AP.

Prosecutors say the senator then wrote a check to his wife, who then wrote one to Uribe, characterizing it as a loan. That characterization was a lie, an attempt to hide the previous bribery, prosecutors said.

Menendez’s lawyers attempted to shift any blame to his wife, arguing that they lived separate lives and that he did not know about her dealings with the three businessmen accused of bribing them.

“She kept Bob away from those conversations,” said her lawyer, Avi Weitzman.

Nathalie Nieves contributed reporting.