At Menendez trial, businessman recounts alleged bribe to senator

Luc Cohen - Reuters - 11/06
A New Jersey businessman testified this week at U.S. Senator Bob Menendez's corruption trial that the lawmaker claimed to have "saved" the insurance broker, who bought Menendez's wife a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz, from criminal probes.
NEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) - A New Jersey businessman testified this week at U.S. Senator Bob Menendez's corruption trial that the lawmaker claimed to have "saved" the insurance broker, who bought Menendez's wife a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz, from criminal probes.
Star prosecution witness Jose Uribe told jurors he bribed Menendez by buying a car for the senator's then-girlfriend Nadine in 2019. Uribe said Nadine Menendez, who married Bob Menendez in 2020, had previously assured him she would relay Uribe's concerns about two insurance fraud probes to the senator.
During dinner the following year at a New Jersey restaurant called Segovia, Uribe said Menendez told him he found the "right people to speak to" - without specifying who.
"He said, 'I saved your ass twice - not once, but twice'," Uribe testified on Monday.
Menendez, 70, a three-term Democratic Senator running for re-election this year as an independent, has pleaded not guilty to 16 criminal charges including bribery, fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction.
The car purc...
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