Former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on Wednesday lost a bid to overturn his corruption conviction after arguing that jurors were exposed to improper evidence during deliberations.
The case was prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York, where the trial lasted nine weeks before going to the jury. In November 2024, Williams acknowledged in a letter to Stein that prosecutors had uploaded nine documents to the jurors’ laptop with fewer redactions than the court had ordered.
The nine improperly redacted documents were part of a collection of 3,074 exhibits available for jurors to review. Williams argued that given the jury’s relatively brief deliberation period of less than three days, they probably never saw the faulty material in question.
The defense seized on the error, filing a motion to vacate jurors’ guilty-on-all-counts verdict. Menendez’s legal team later flagged two additional exhibits given to jurors as problematic, including one where Fred Daibes, a co-defendant in the case, referred to an antique Mercedes-Benz he had bought as his “Hitler car” because it’s similar to a model infamously owned by Adolf Hitler.
Defense lawyers also criticized the prosecution for wiping the laptop clean without first asking them, making it impossible for a forensic review that would determine whether jurors had viewed any of the exhibits, and if so, which ones.
Stein dismissed these arguments. In Wednesday’s ruling, he said that the defense team, too, shared responsibility for failing to catch the unredacted material before it went to the jury.
“If these exhibits were as critical as Menendez now claims, surely they would have been amongst the ’select number of exhibit files’ ... that the defense read during its review of the laptop, but they were either not read by the defense or the error was not noticed,” the judge wrote.
Stein also agreed with Williams’s assessment that the jury likely never noticed the unredacted material. Even if they had, he said, it probably didn’t prejudice their verdict.
“Even in the infinitesimal chance that the jury happened upon this evidence, there is similarly a minuscule likelihood that the jury would have understood it, much less attribute the significance to these exhibits that the defendants now do,” he said.
In September 2023, Menendez was indicted by federal prosecutors on corruption charges for allegedly taking bribes from three businessmen in exchange for taking actions to benefit them and the governments of Qatar and Egypt. Two of the businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, stood trial alongside Menendez and were also convicted on all counts. A third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified during the trial.
Menendez resigned from office in August 2024, a month after his conviction. His Senate seat is now held by Andy Kim, a three-term Democrat congressman who defeated Republican businessman Curtis Bashaw in last year’s closely watched election.
