Türkiye and Belarus have discussed prospects for cooperation in a number of areas
Day: May 17, 2024
- The Latest
- Opening Statements
- Key Players
- The Charges
- Menendez’s Political Future
An F.B.I. agent, testifying for the government, described his search of Senator Robert Menendez’s house in New Jersey.
Listen to this article · 5:31 min Learn more
Jurors in the corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez on Thursday were handed plastic bags containing gold bars, allowing them to touch an object at the heart of the government’s case.Credit…Andrew Kelly/Reuters
By Benjamin Weiser and Maia Coleman
With the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey underway on Thursday, a prosecutor handed a juror in the first row of the jury box a plastic bag containing an object at the heart of the government’s case: a gold bar that glinted under the courtroom lights.
One by one, jurors held the bag, turning it over in their hands and feeling its weight before passing it to their neighbor — the jury’s first tangible exposure to evidence prosecutors say was a bribe paid to Mr. Menendez, 70, and his wife.
The prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, soon handed jurors another bag containing several gold bars. But before she could hand over a third, the judge, Sidney H. Stein, said the jury “has gotten a feel for the weight of gold.”
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been charged with accepting gifts collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including gold, cash and a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible, in exchange for the senator’s dispensing of political favors to the governments of Egypt and Qatar and to three New Jersey businessmen.
The senator and two of the businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — are being tried together in Manhattan federal court. Ms. Menendez, 57, was to be tried with them, but her trial was postponed after her lawyers said she had a “serious medical condition.”
On Thursday, the senator revealed that Ms. Menendez was being treated for breast cancer and was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment.
The third businessman charged in the case, Jose Uribe, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify as a prosecution witness at the trial.
The trial of Mr. Menendez, Mr. Hana and Mr. Daibes is expected to last more than a month. In an opening statement on Wednesday, Avi Weitzman, a lawyer for the senator, largely pinned blame for the bribery charges on Ms. Menendez, who he said had hidden her past dire finances from her husband and “what she was asking others to give her.”
On Thursday morning, lawyers for the senator’s co-defendants, in their opening statements, portrayed their clients as friends of the couple whose innocent acts of generosity were being unfairly cast by prosecutors as criminal.
“It’s about criminalizing friendships,” said Mr. Hana’s lawyer, Lawrence S. Lustberg. Mr. Daibes’s lawyer, César de Castro, said his client had not given anything to the Menendezes to influence them or have the senator engage in any official act on anyone’s behalf.
The presentation of the gold bars came as an F.B.I. special agent, Aristotelis Kougemitros, the government’s first witness, testified about the gold and cash seized during a June 2022 search of the Menendezes’ home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Agent Kougemitros, who led the search team, said investigators seized $486,461 in cash, 11 one-ounce gold bars and two one-kilogram bars.
Although the agent’s testimony focused on the valuable items found in the search, his account, along with F.B.I. photographs that were taken, offered jurors an uncommonly intimate visit to the Menendezes’ home.
Photograph after photograph was displayed from inside the couple’s bedroom, which had been locked and could only be opened with the help of an F.B.I. locksmith, the agent testified. Inside were photographs of the senator and his wife. There was an exercise machine by their bed; even their en suite bathroom was visible.
A photo of the contents of a closet showed aquamarine lingerie and playful ties, including two that depicted mice eating cheese.
Agent Kougemitros said that, with the locksmith’s help, the team entered two bedroom closets, each secured with deadbolt locks, and found gold bars, jewelry and a safe. Inside the safe were boxes and envelopes of cash. In other parts of the house, agents found more cash: in clothing, a duffel bag, plastic bags and men’s shoes. The Mercedes was parked in a cluttered garage.
During the initial phase of the search, Agent Kougemitros said, agents carefully laid out, counted and photographed the cash. Eventually, he said, the “sheer volume of bills” was too much to count by hand, “so we got cash-counting machines — you’ve probably seen them in movies.”
At one point, the agent stepped off the witness stand and opened a box to show the jury a bag stuffed with cash, which he said was found in the senator’s office and contained $100,000.
Late Thursday, Adam Fee, a lawyer for the senator, raised questions during cross-examination about whether the senator even had access to the bedroom closet where the safe and gold had been found. He focused on the location of a blue blazer that the agent said had been hanging inside the closet and was linked to the senator.
Mr. Fee zoomed in on photographs that he said made it clear the blazer was hanging on an adjacent door outside of the closet.
“Do you want to change that testimony?” he asked the agent. He did not change his account.
The cross-examination was in line with the defense strategy of suggesting Ms. Menendez had secrets the senator was not privy to. On Wednesday, in Mr. Weitzman’s opening statement, he hammered home that point, saying the senator did not have a key to the closet nor did he know gold was kept there.
“It is Nadine’s closet,” he said. “In fact, when you look inside the closet, you will see that it is filled with all of Nadine’s clothing. Women’s clothing.”
Tracey Tully contributed reporting.
- The Latest
- Opening Statements
- Key Players
- The Charges
- Menendez’s Political Future
An F.B.I. agent, testifying for the government, described his search of Senator Robert Menendez’s house in New Jersey.
Listen to this article · 5:31 min Learn more
Jurors in the corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez on Thursday were handed plastic bags containing gold bars, allowing them to touch an object at the heart of the government’s case.Credit…Andrew Kelly/Reuters
By Benjamin Weiser and Maia Coleman
With the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey underway on Thursday, a prosecutor handed a juror in the first row of the jury box a plastic bag containing an object at the heart of the government’s case: a gold bar that glinted under the courtroom lights.
One by one, jurors held the bag, turning it over in their hands and feeling its weight before passing it to their neighbor — the jury’s first tangible exposure to evidence prosecutors say was a bribe paid to Mr. Menendez, 70, and his wife.
The prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, soon handed jurors another bag containing several gold bars. But before she could hand over a third, the judge, Sidney H. Stein, said the jury “has gotten a feel for the weight of gold.”
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been charged with accepting gifts collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including gold, cash and a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible, in exchange for the senator’s dispensing of political favors to the governments of Egypt and Qatar and to three New Jersey businessmen.
The senator and two of the businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — are being tried together in Manhattan federal court. Ms. Menendez, 57, was to be tried with them, but her trial was postponed after her lawyers said she had a “serious medical condition.”
On Thursday, the senator revealed that Ms. Menendez was being treated for breast cancer and was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment.
The third businessman charged in the case, Jose Uribe, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify as a prosecution witness at the trial.
The trial of Mr. Menendez, Mr. Hana and Mr. Daibes is expected to last more than a month. In an opening statement on Wednesday, Avi Weitzman, a lawyer for the senator, largely pinned blame for the bribery charges on Ms. Menendez, who he said had hidden her past dire finances from her husband and “what she was asking others to give her.”
On Thursday morning, lawyers for the senator’s co-defendants, in their opening statements, portrayed their clients as friends of the couple whose innocent acts of generosity were being unfairly cast by prosecutors as criminal.
“It’s about criminalizing friendships,” said Mr. Hana’s lawyer, Lawrence S. Lustberg. Mr. Daibes’s lawyer, César de Castro, said his client had not given anything to the Menendezes to influence them or have the senator engage in any official act on anyone’s behalf.
The presentation of the gold bars came as an F.B.I. special agent, Aristotelis Kougemitros, the government’s first witness, testified about the gold and cash seized during a June 2022 search of the Menendezes’ home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Agent Kougemitros, who led the search team, said investigators seized $486,461 in cash, 11 one-ounce gold bars and two one-kilogram bars.
Although the agent’s testimony focused on the valuable items found in the search, his account, along with F.B.I. photographs that were taken, offered jurors an uncommonly intimate visit to the Menendezes’ home.
Photograph after photograph was displayed from inside the couple’s bedroom, which had been locked and could only be opened with the help of an F.B.I. locksmith, the agent testified. Inside were photographs of the senator and his wife. There was an exercise machine by their bed; even their en suite bathroom was visible.
A photo of the contents of a closet showed aquamarine lingerie and playful ties, including two that depicted mice eating cheese.
Agent Kougemitros said that, with the locksmith’s help, the team entered two bedroom closets, each secured with deadbolt locks, and found gold bars, jewelry and a safe. Inside the safe were boxes and envelopes of cash. In other parts of the house, agents found more cash: in clothing, a duffel bag, plastic bags and men’s shoes. The Mercedes was parked in a cluttered garage.
During the initial phase of the search, Agent Kougemitros said, agents carefully laid out, counted and photographed the cash. Eventually, he said, the “sheer volume of bills” was too much to count by hand, “so we got cash-counting machines — you’ve probably seen them in movies.”
At one point, the agent stepped off the witness stand and opened a box to show the jury a bag stuffed with cash, which he said was found in the senator’s office and contained $100,000.
Late Thursday, Adam Fee, a lawyer for the senator, raised questions during cross-examination about whether the senator even had access to the bedroom closet where the safe and gold had been found. He focused on the location of a blue blazer that the agent said had been hanging inside the closet and was linked to the senator.
Mr. Fee zoomed in on photographs that he said made it clear the blazer was hanging on an adjacent door outside of the closet.
“Do you want to change that testimony?” he asked the agent. He did not change his account.
The cross-examination was in line with the defense strategy of suggesting Ms. Menendez had secrets the senator was not privy to. On Wednesday, in Mr. Weitzman’s opening statement, he hammered home that point, saying the senator did not have a key to the closet nor did he know gold was kept there.
“It is Nadine’s closet,” he said. “In fact, when you look inside the closet, you will see that it is filled with all of Nadine’s clothing. Women’s clothing.”
Tracey Tully contributed reporting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have issued a one-sentence statement about nuclear war as part of their “new era” strategic partnership.
Putin and Xi announced plans to deepen their partnership on Thursday, issuing a statement addressing their position on a number of issues facing the world, ranging from questions about the economy to the war between Russia and Ukraine. China and Russia have steadily strengthened ties as the two countries have found regularly themselves at odds with much of the West.
The United States has seen its long-frayed relations with both countries become even more strained in recent years. Washington emerged as a staunch supporter of Ukraine after Putin ordered an invasion of the Eastern European nation in February 2022, delivering billions of dollars of aid to help Kyiv defend itself.
Meanwhile, relations with China remain tense over, among other concerns, Taiwan. The question of Taiwanese independence has been a sticking point between the U.S. and China.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear in Beijing on May 16, 2024. In a joint statement, Putin and Xi addressed their position on the use of nuclear weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear in Beijing on May 16, 2024. In a joint statement, Putin and Xi addressed their position on the use of nuclear weapons.
ALEXANDER RYUMIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Beijing’s “One China” policy dictates that Taiwan, an island off the country’s coast, is part of China. Taiwan’s leaders, however, consider the island to be its own nation. While the United States does not officially recognize the island’s independence, it has pledged to defend it against a Chinese invasion.
Some experts and officials have raised concerns that these regional conflicts could eventually escalate into a wider war with the United States, culminating in fears that nuclear weapons could eventually be used.
However, China and Russia addressed their stance on nuclear war in their joint statement issued on Thursday.
“There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought,” the statement reads.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and China’s International Press Center for further comment via email.
Javed Ali, a professor at the University of Michigan and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, told Newsweek on Thursday the statement “indicates the confidence both countries feel about declared nuclear powers and how those weapons—like for the United States, France, and Great Britain–are part of each country’s national security posture.”
The summit is an “indicator of the strong relationship” between the two counties as the two leaders both believe the U.S. and allies have worked to diminish their influence, according to Ali.
“The degree to which these Russian and Chinese ties endure is an open question, since both President Xi and President Putin also have to manage their national interests and may view the current framework as more transactional than strategic,” he said noting that U.S. policy treats Russia and China differently given deeper economic ties to Beijing.
Putin warned during a statement in March that the chances of nuclear war would increase if Western nations send troops to Ukraine, which has long been viewed as a red line for Russia that Ukraine’s allies have not been willing to cross.
While Russian authorities have long sought to downplay nuclear fears, pundits on Russian state TV, which aligns with the Kremlin, have repeatedly discussed the possibility of nuclear war, fueling concerns.
In response to Putin’s remarks in March, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, warned about the risks of nuclear war just days later.
“In January 2022, leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states issued a joint-statement, affirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” she said. “China believes that all nuclear weapon states need to embrace the idea of common security and uphold global strategic balance and stability.”
Mao continued: “Under the current circumstances, parties need to jointly seek de-escalation and lower strategic risks.”
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.