NEW YORK — 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.
William-Thompson's testimony about the Washington dinner highlights a key facet of the indictment against Menendez, the three businessmen and Nadine Menendez that first brought them to Manhattan federal court last fall to face criminal charges. One businessman has pleaded guilty and will testify against Menendez and two other businessmen who are on trial together. Nadine Menendez is scheduled for a July trial. The two other businessmen and both Menendezes have pleaded not guilty.
According to the indictment, the May 21, 2019, steakhouse dinner included the Menendez couple, fellow defendant Wael Hana and an unidentified Egyptian official hours after they had met in Menendez's Senate office in Washington.
During the office meeting, Hana asked Menendez to assist him in countering efforts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to oppose the monopoly his company had been granted to certify all meat products shipped from the U.S. to Egypt as complying with religious requirements, the indictment said.
