When Sen. Robert Menendez was charged last year with participating in a complex bribery scheme, news headlines highlighted one particular detail: Investigators discovered $480,000 in cash and 13 gold bars when his home in New Jersey was searched.
A few days later, senator give an explanation for cash, saying he regularly withdrew large sums from his savings account, a custom he said he learned from his Cuban immigrant parents.
Now, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have gone further, claiming the habit stems from deep psychological trauma tied to his father’s suicide and a family history of property confiscation in Cuba.
They want a psychiatrist who evaluated Mr. Menendez, 70, to testify at the senator’s trial about what they describe as “past traumatic experiences involving cash and finances.” your”.
Mr. Menendez’s father was a compulsive gambler and died by suicide after Mr. Menendez “decided to stop paying his father’s gambling debts,” the senator’s lawyer said in a recent letter to government described the psychiatrist’s findings.
The psychiatrist’s conclusions were revealed for the first time late Wednesday in a government court filing accompanying the letter. In the filing, the office of Damian Williams, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked the judge to bar the psychiatrist, Karen B. Rosenbaum, from testifying at the senator’s trial.
The dispute over Dr. Rosenbaum’s potential testimony comes less than two weeks before the start of Mr. Menendez’s widely anticipated trial in Manhattan on federal corruption charges.
Dr. Rosenbaum will testify that the death of Mr. Menendez’s father and his parents’ history as Cuban refugees left him with a “fear of scarcity” that led to “a long-standing coping mechanism of frequent withdrawal and kept cash in his home,” the senator’s lawyer said. , Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, wrote..
Prosecutors, in asking Federal District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein to dismiss the testimony, said Dr. Rosenbaum’s comments “do not appear to be the product of any principle or What is a reliable scientific method?
They also argued that having the doctor testify appeared to be an attempt by Mr. Menendez to present the alleged events to the jury without having to face cross-examination by testifying himself.
At the very least, they said, if Judge Stein intended to allow Dr. Rosenbaum to testify, the prosecution could request that the senator be examined by a psychiatrist retained by the government.
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat and former chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is accused of accepting bribes in exchange for being willing to use his influence to help allies in New Zealand. Jersey and supports the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
He will be tried along with two New Jersey businessmen who are also accused of participating in the bribery scheme. The senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is There is also a fee but a separate trial version is providedin July, after her lawyer said she had one serious medical condition that would require surgery and a lengthy recovery period.
All four defendants pleaded not guilty.
The 66-page indictment outlines various conspiracies. But maybe nothing attract public attention as much as its depictions of cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz convertible found during a search of the senator’s home in Edgewood Cliffs, NJ in June 2022
Investigators discovered much of the cash stuffed in envelopes and hidden in clothing, shoes, duffel bags and safes. Legal records.
After being Charged in September, Mr. Menendez offered what he called an “outdated” explanation for at least some of the cash discovered in the search. He said that for 30 years he had Withdraw money every week from your savings account For emergencies.”
He told reporters he did this “because of my family’s history of facing confiscation in Cuba.”
However, prosecutors say some of the cash discovered in the house was wrapped in ribbons indicating it had been withdrawn, at least $10,000 at a time, from a bank. both Mr. Menendez and his wife already have an account. They wrote in court documents that this was an indication “that the money had been provided to them by someone else.”
Mr. Menendez was born in New York City in 1954 to parents who had fled Cuba in the years before Fidel Castro took control of the country. He spoke and wrote about growing up in an apartment in Union City, a dense community in northern New Jersey that became a magnet for overseas Cuban refugees.
Mr. Menendez was just 23 years old when his father, a carpenter, died. he told the New York Times in 2005. His mother is a seamstress.
