New Jersey businessman tells jury that bribes paid off with Sen. Bob Menendez

NEW YORK (AP) — A New Jersey businessman who prosecutors say bribed Sen. Bob Menendez testified Monday that the Democrat told him in summer 2019 that he’d look into a state criminal probe threatening his business and later assured him there was no threat and boasted about saving him.

At the time, Jose Uribe said in Manhattan federal court, he assumed that Menendez knew he had made a $15,000 down payment and was making monthly payments on a Mercedes-Benz for Menendez’s girlfriend, who married Menendez a year later.

Prosecutors contend that the car, along with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, were bribes paid by three businessmen, including Uribe, to get the senator to use his influence to serve their purposes and earn them money from 2018 to 2023.

Defense lawyers for Menendez have argued that the meeting with Uribe and other evidence cited by prosecutors is nothing more than a senator meeting with constituents and doing what he can to help his state in his role as one of its representatives in Congress.

Menendez, 70, has resisted calls to step down as New Jersey’s senior senator, though he was forced out of his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after charges were unveiled last fall.

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