Menendez could lose Foreign Relations chairmanship with indictment

A federal indictment against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) unsealed Friday could threaten his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senate Democratic Conference rules require members serving in leadership and as committee chairs to step down if charged with a felony. The lawmaker can resume his or her position if the charges are subsequently dropped or reduced to less than a felony. 

That’s the situation now facing Menendez, who stepped down as Foreign Relations chairman when he was previously indicted in 2015.

Menedez’s office did not respond to a request for comment by The Hill. 

Suzanne Wrasse, spokesperson for the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Jim Risch (Idaho), said that the top Republican “hopes to hear from the Democrat leader as soon as possible so the committee’s important work can go on uninterrupted.” 

“Democratic leadership of the committee is the responsibility of the Democratic leadership in the Senate. There is precedent on these types of issues in their conference,” Wrasse told The Hill. 

Menendez slammed the indictment as an overreach by prosecutors who failed to secure a conviction against him in a prior case.

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent. They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office,” he said in a statement. “They wrote these charges as they wanted; the facts are not as presented.”

After Menendez’s prior indictment, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) took over duties from the New Jersey lawmaker until charges were dropped when a jury was unable to reach a verdict. Menendez resumed his position as ranking member in February 2018. 

Cardin would also be in line to take over as chairman this time, though he announced in May that he will retire from the Senate at the end of his term in January 2025. 

The U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York unsealed the indictment against Menendez and his wife, Nadine, on Friday.

The government alleges that Menendez “provided sensitive U.S. government information and took other steps that secretly aided the government of Egypt,” the indictment reads.

“Menendez also improperly advised and pressured an official at the United States Department of Agriculture for the purpose of protecting a business monopoly” Egypt granted Wael “Will” Hana, the businessman named in the indictment, that was used to pay the bribes. 

At other points in the indictment, Menendez is described as skirting his committee, at one point asking the State Department for a breakdown of staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, information “deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public.”

Menendez, without alerting the State Department or any of his congressional staff,  passed it along to his then-girlfriend, who passed it along to a friend also charged in the indictment, who passed it along to an Egyptian government official.

Menendez is also alleged to have “ghost-wrote” a letter on behalf of Egypt “seeking to convince other U.S. Senators to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt.” 

And at another point, the indictment notes Menendez and his wife organized a trip to Egypt through one of their government officials, originally planning the trip “as an unofficial visit, and therefore without supervision from the State Department.”

When one of Menendez’s staffers contacted the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, it spurred the trip to become a formal delegation visit, prompting the Egyptian official to fret “i will probably loose [sic] my job” and “SOS”.

The allegations Menendez used his position on the committee to benefit Egypt is likely to draw blowback from his Democratic colleagues who have pushed for the presidential administration’s to impose costs against Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his government over human rights abuse. 

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Middle East, has repeatedly advocated for the Biden administration to withhold aid to Egypt on human rights concerns.

Menendez has a reputation as a hard-nosed legislator who has broken from party lines at times.

He was an opponent of the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran and, Friday, led a bipartisan letter to European governments praising them on upholding restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile and drone program.

Earlier this week, he introduced legislation with Democratic and Republican senators aimed at imposing costs on Azerbaijan over their aggression against Armenians in the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.