Defense attorney: Menendez indictment an 'attack' on Hispanic-American community

NEWARK — The bribery case the government has brought against U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez and a wealthy Florida ophthalmologist of Dominican descent is an “attack” on the Hispanic-American community, a defense attorney asserted Thursday.

At the core of the friendship between Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, and co-defendant Salomon Melgen is their membership in a “fellowship” of Hispanic-American entrepreneurs, businessmen, doctors and politicians who have tried to pay their good fortune forward by helping other Hispanic Americans improve their lives, Melgen’s lead attorney Kirk Ogrosky said in a federal courtroom Thursday.

“This case is not only an attack on these two men,” Ogrosky said. “It’s an attack on that whole group.”

That claim came on the second day of a trial that could have broad implications for the partisan composition of the Senate and federal prosecutors' ability to make corruption charges stick following a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that limited the scope of federal bribery laws.

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Continuing an opening statement he began the day before, Ogrosky spent more than an hour Thursday trying to undercut the portrait prosecutors gave Wednesday of a bribery scheme involving “a corrupt politician who sold his senate office for a life of luxury he couldn't afford, and a greedy doctor who put that politician on his payroll for when he needed the services of a United States senator.”

Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, is facing a dozen charges related to allegations that he did favors for Melgen in exchange for stays at his house in an exclusive Dominican Republic resort, flights on his private jet, hotel stays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions. Both men have maintained their innocence.

Ogrosky described the deep cultural and personal connection between Menendez, one of the few Hispanic Americans in the Senate, and Melgen, an upstart doctor when he met Menendez in the early 1990s. 

He highlighted that Menendez had singled out Melgen as a Hispanic-American success story in his 2009 book “Growing American Roots" and read the inscription the senator had written in a copy given to Melgen: “For my brother Sal, with affection for our brotherhood and respect for what you have accomplished. Yes, it’s possible. Yes we can.”

Prosecutors argued Wednesday that the fact the two men are friends does not absolve them of guilt. "There's no friendship exception to bribery,” lead prosecutor Peter Koski said. “There's no friendship exception to lying on your financial disclosure forms. There's no friendship exception to breaking the law.”

But Ogrosky asserted Thursday that “friendship is an absolute defense to bribery” because it shows that there was no corrupt intent behind the gifts and favors — a contention that’s central to the government’s bribery allegations.

“When you do things for friends because you love them like a brother, there’s no bribe,” Ogrosky said.

The attorney also told jurors that the government would not be able to show that Menendez and Melgen explicitly agreed to exchange specific favors in a quid pro quo, or this-for-that, arrangement — another element needed to prove bribery.

To prove this, prosecutors have said they will show how the timing of official actions taken by Menendez lined up with the provision of gifts or contributions by Melgen.

For example, Koski said Wednesday, a Menendez staffer emailed Melgen on April 30, 2012, asking for $60,000 for groups supporting the senator. The doctor made that donation 16 days later — the same day that Menendez met with officials at the State Department to discuss port security in the Dominican Republic, an area in which Melgen had a financial interest.

Menendez is also alleged to have improperly interfered on Melgen's behalf in a $8.9 million Medicare billing dispute the doctor had with the government and in three visa applications to allow Melgen's foreign girlfriends to visit him in Florida.

But Ogrosky said Thursday that no such evidence of a this-for-that arrangement exists and that the government’s case is based on selective editing and the false assumption that the men's friendship is a "sham."

He showed the jury records of dozens of flights Menendez had taken to visit Melgen at the doctor's home in the Dominican Republic resort, the vast majority of which Menendez paid for himself. He displayed pictures of Menendez sitting around the dinner table with Melgen's family and the nice but not lavish guest bedrooms where the senator slept.

“These are family trips he paid for to be with Sal and his family," Ogrosky said. “That’s a heck of a bribe: ‘I’ll bribe you, pay your own way.’ That’s baloney.”

Also Thursday, the first witness in the case took the stand. Jane Ruch, an intelligence analyst with the FBI, answered questions about emails exchanged between Menendez and others that eventually resulted in Melgen using his American Express rewards points to book the senator a three-night, $4,934.10 stay at the upscale Park Hyatt Hotel in Paris.

The federal district judge overseeing the case, William H. Walls, at one point became agitated with prosecutors' line of questioning about room rates and other logistical details and excused the jury so he could scold prosecutors for drawing inferences not supported by the facts.

“Whether these defendants engaged in bribery does not depend upon whether the senator chose a more expensive room," Walls said, adding that he would not entertain a "tabloid trial."

If the jury finds him guilty of bribery charges, Menendez would be the second New Jersey senator convicted on bribery counts since 1981, when Harrison "Pete" Williams faced charges stemming from the notorious Abscam scandal.

Should that happen, Republicans are likely to call for Menendez to step down immediately. And if he does, or if he’s forced out of the Senate by a two-thirds majority vote before Jan. 16, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, an ally of President Donald Trump, would be able to pick his replacement.

Christie's choice of a fellow Republican would pad the GOP's slim majority in the Senate and could aid the party's efforts to pass legislation.

But Walls could still decide to dismiss the charges against Menendez before the jury has the chance to weigh in.

Menendez's attorneys have argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell changed what the government has to show to prove bribery so much that the senator's 2015 indictment should be thrown out.

That decision already led a federal appeals court earlier this year to overturn the corruption conviction of New York state's former Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver.

Walls has said that he needs to hear the evidence prosecutors present at trial before he can decide whether to dismiss the charges. Should he do so, that would be an embarrassment for a Justice Department that saw its last conviction of a sitting senator, Ted Stevens of Alaska, be overturned in 2009 because of prosecutorial misconduct.

The trial resumes Monday.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com