FBI investigator gives jury at Sen. Bob Menendez’s trial an inside account of surveillance

NEW YORK (AP) — An investigator provided a New York jury a riveting account on Tuesday of an evening in Washington, D.C., in 2019 when an FBI surveillance team came across Sen. Bob Menendez and his girlfriend at a fancy restaurant.

The investigator, Terrie Williams-Thompson, told the jury at Menendez’s bribery trial that the team was following another person at the table at Morton’s when she overheard Menendez’s future wife, Nadine Arslanian, ask: “What else can the love of my life do for you?”

Williams-Thompson testified she heard the comment while sitting two arm’s lengths from the table while posing with another FBI investigator as a married couple on a date. She said they secretly filmed Menendez’s table as she strained to hear what she could and even posed for a picture to secretly photograph those at the table.

The testimony provided the jury one of the more interesting segments of testimony at a trial in its fourth week that has featured long stints on the stand by FBI agents and others as hundreds of pieces of evidence from emails to phone recordings to bank records to gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash were shown to the jury.

The cash and gold bars, found by the FBI during a 2022 raid in the home the couple shared in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, has featured prominently in the prosecution’s claim that the 70-year-old senator and his wife accepted the valuables, along with a fancy car, in return for aiding three New Jersey businessmen in their business pursuits.

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