US senator indicted for accepting bribes to benefit Egypt

For involvement in a “years-long bribery scheme” that allowed Egyptian officials direct illicit access to a key shaper of American foreign policy, a New York attorney general indicted on Friday Democrat Senator Robert Menenedez, his wife, Nadine Menendez, and three New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes.

Menendez, who was indicted for bribery but not convicted in a separate case in 2015, stepped down as chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the district court announced the indictment.

The indictment document lays out charges that Menendez and his wife received bribes to use his influence as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to tend to Egypt’s interests, from facilitating US military aid to lobbying for issues like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. 

It further charges them with attempting to lobby US government officials to turn a blind eye toward anticompetitive practices by Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, which was used, the indictment claims, to pay the bribes to Menendez and his wife. Halal certifier IS EG Halal, in a convenient coincidence, is the only company Egypt has qualified to audit US beef exporters. 

Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman, is the lynchpin who brought together the rest of the defendants and five unnamed Egyptian government officials, including military and intelligence figures, who are mentioned in the document. Nadine eventually came in direct communication with the Egyptian officials as well.

The five defendants were all charged with conspiring to commit and committing bribery and fraud. Menendez and his wife were also charged with extortion. The couple have denied all charges. 

Mada Masr has broken down the 39-page indictment document built on text messages and call logs between Robert and Nadine Menendez, Egyptian officials and Hana and his associates. While the US senator has denied the claims put forth in the document, if they are proven true, it would shine a uniquely public light on how Egypt has been able to influence American policy.

Military talks and deals

The connection between Menendez, Hana and Egyptian officials begins in 2018, according to the indictment. Hana and Nadine, then Menendez’s new girlfriend, started setting up a series of dinners between the senator and Egyptian military personnel or government officials. At these meetings the Egyptian side raised requests related to foreign military sales and foreign military financing, to which Menendez and Nadine responded by promising that the senator would use his power and authority to facilitate such deals and financing to Egypt. Hana, in turn, promised to put Nadine on his company’s payroll for a low-or-no-show job as a financial incentive for use of the senator’s influence. 

The United States has provided about $1.3 billion in military financing to Egypt annually since 1987 – some of which is then used to purchase US military equipment. Since 2014, Congress has exercised its power to condition $300 million of the financing on human rights reforms. In recent years, vocal critics of Egypt’s human rights record in the US Congress have sought to block portions of that military financing package, as well as arms sale deals with Egypt, to varying degrees of success.

In 2017, the year before Egyptian officials made contact with the Menendez, the administration of former US President Donald Trump denied US$95.7 million in grants and aid to Egypt, as well as a delay to the disbursement of $195 million in military financing because of “Egypt’s failure to respect human rights and democratic norms.” Moreover, as the indictment notes, “no foreign military sales of offensive military equipment to Egypt requiring congressional notification had been concluded since in or about March 2016.”

This set the stage for meeting Menendez, who played a crucial role in greenlighting military financing in the Senate. 

“At all times relevant to the Indictment, Robert Menendez, the defendant, as the Chairman or the Ranking Member of the SFRC, possessed substantial influence over foreign military sales and foreign military financing to Egypt,” the indictment document notes. The US State Department does not proceed with military sales or financing deals if they do not have the sign-off of the chair or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

Following the initial dinners, Menendez held a first meeting at his DC office in March 2018 with an Egyptian military official, referred to in the indictment as “Egyptian Official-1,” where foreign military financing to Egypt, among other topics, was discussed.

In May of the same year, Menendez communicated via Hana to Egyptian Official-1 that the US has lifted a ban on selling small arms, ammunition, and sniper rifles to Egypt, indicating that “sales can begin.”

In the same month, Menendez ghost-wrote a letter for the Egyptian government to present to US senators to convince them to release US$300 million in aid that was withheld on account of human rights violations.

Afterward, in July, Menendez, Hana and Nadine met with Egyptian Official-1 and several other Egyptian military officials to discuss military financing and sales. Ahead of the meeting, the Egyptian side, via Hana and Nadine, sent Menendez briefing materials advocating Egypt’s foreign policy agenda and goals, as well as setting forth requests to approve military sales and financing to Egypt.

The following day, Menendez sent Nadine a text message: 

“Tell Will [HANA] I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today. Egypt: 46,000 120MM Target Practice Rounds and 10,000 Rounds Tank Ammunition: $99 million 

NOTE: These tank rounds are for tanks they have had for many years. They are using these in the Sinai for the counter-terrorism campaign.”

Nadine forwarded the text to Hana who then forwarded it to Egyptian Official 1 and another Egyptian official. 

In May 2019, Menendez, Nadine, and Hana met with an Egyptian intelligence official designated as “Egyptian Official-3,” whom Nadine referred to in her messages as “The General.” The meeting included a discussion of human rights violations in Egypt that have led to the withholding of portions of the annual US military financing package to Egypt. 

In June 2021, Nadine and an Egyptian official, designated as Egyptian Official-4, arranged a meeting in a DC hotel that brought together Menendez and “Egyptian Official-5,” whom the indictment document described as a senior intelligence official. The day after, Menendez provided Egyptian Official-4, via Nadine, with a copy of an article containing the questions that the senators intended to ask Egyptian Official-5 regarding the human rights file in Egypt. “I just thought it would be better to know ahead of time what is being talked about and this way you can prepare your rebuttals,” Nadine said in her text messages. Press releases from members of US Congress from that time indicate that US senators and members of Congress were set to meet General Intelligence Service Director Abbas Kamel during an official visit to Washington.

In January 2022, Menendez sent Nadine a news article reporting on two US arms sales totaling about $2.5 billion that were pending at the time — and approved soon after by the Biden Administration. Nadine forwarded the link to Hana, adding “Bob had to sign off on this.”

Lobbying and information gathering for Egypt

Menendez also allegedly used his position to put Egypt’s regional interests at the forefront of the US government’s agenda, lobbying for decisions or communication to move forward in Egypt’s favor.

In April 2020, Menenedez communicated his concern to the US Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State about the development of negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This was part of the deal between Nadine, his wife, and government officials to safeguard Egypt’s interests.

“I am writing to express my concern about the stalled negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over [the Dam],” the senator’s letter said, adding, “I therefore urge you to significantly increase the State Department’s engagement on negotiations surrounding the [Dam].”

On one occasion, Menendez also communicated to Nadine information regarding the number and nationality of the staff at the US embassy in Cairo that he acquired from the US State Department. Nadine then passed the information along to Egyptian Official-2 via Hana. According to the indictment, this information was “deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public.”

How was Menendez paid off? Setting up the halal meat monopoly

According to the indictment, Robert and Nadine Menendez were paid off by Hana and his business associates Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer, and Uribe, a trucking and insurance broker who had had his insurance broker’s license revoked on account of fraud. The bribery payments came in a variety of forms, from payments on a home loan to a new car to gold bars to cash transfers for a low-or no-show job given to Nadine Menendez at IS EG Halal. The indictment states that Robert and Nadine Menendez  received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, both to further Egyptian government interests and for their own gain. 

At the center of the bribes is IS EG Halal, the company that suddenly secured a monopoly on the supply of halal meat to Egypt in 2019. How Hana’s company, IS EG Halal Certified, was granted by the Agriculture Ministry a monopoly on certifying Egypt’s halal beef imports was first detailed in an investigation published by Mada Masr in December 2019 that looked at the details of the deal, the corruption behind it and its repercussions on the meat market.

According to the report, the Agriculture Ministry abruptly disqualified all halal certifiers eligible to operate in the United States in May 2019, except for one newly licensed company: IS EG Halal Certified. 

The company, founded by Hana, was an unknown entity for many in the market, including both importers and exporters, and to foreign governments as well, until it started operating after the ministry’s decision. A report at the time issued by the US Embassy’s Foreign Agriculture Service described it as a non-governmental company established in November 2017 with no prior experience in halal certification or pre-existing ties to the American beef industry.

Five months later, the ministry awarded the same company exclusive certification rights in South America as well, a major source of Egypt’s imported meat. 

The company’s first order of business, days after it became the exclusive certifier, was to raise certification fees in North America, translating into millions of dollars of extra revenue, according to calculations made by Mada Masr. The FAS estimates that the price of American beef liver in the Egyptian market rose by about LE13 per kilo following the move.

Mada Masr’s investigation revealed that IS EG operates alongside another firm, Medi Trade, that is linked to a “sovereign entity,” a term used to refer to high-level security institutions in government. According to sources in the industry, IS EG made Medi Trade, on which public information is scarce, the sole distributor of the halal certification — creating a bottleneck for meat importers in Egypt.

The indictment states that Hana used his ties to Egyptian government and military officials to push for the IS EG Halal monopoly, which would then serve as a sustainable revenue stream to use to pay off Nadine after she threatened that Menendez would “cease acting for Hana’s benefit and at his request, including with respect to Egypt, unless Hana came through on his promises and paid her.”

The document notes that an Egyptian government official informed Hana in April 2019, a month ahead of the Agriculture Ministry’s decision, that IS EG was likely to become Egypt’s sole halal certifier for imports from the US market. The next day, Nadine texted Menendez, “Seems like halal went through. It might be a fantastic 2019 all the way around.”

When the US Department of Agriculture contacted the Egyptian government in May 2019 to object to the monopoly on the grounds that its increased certification had disrupted the US meat market, Menendez received materials regarding the USDA objections from Hana via Nadine, some of which Hana acquired from an Egyptian official. After that, Menendez called a high-level USDA official and insisted they stop opposing IS EG’s status as sole halal certifier, despite the official’s attempts to explain the negative effects of the monopoly, which the company kept despite the USDA not dropping the case.

In July 2019, Hana used the company to pay about $23,000 to bring Nadine’s mortgage current, following a series of discussions with Nadine, Uribe and Daibes about how to pay the amount. In one message, Uribe indicated Hana might balk at the amount, to which Nadine responded, “when I feel comfortable and plan the trip to Egypt he [i.e., Hana] will be more powerful than the president of Egypt.”

Throughout the rest of 2019, IS EG issued three checks of $10,000 each to Nadine’s company, Strategic International Business Consultants, facilitated or provided by Diabes. Text messages indicate Nadine requested these amounts after meetings Menendez had with Egyptian officials that year.

In early 2021, Hana also used IS EG funds to purchase online two exercise machines and an air purifier, among other items, collectively worth thousands of dollars, and deliver them to the Menendez house.

The New Jersey trio also paid off the Menendez couple in other ways. In late January 2022, Nadine Menendez sent New Jersey businessman Daibes a text: “Thank you. Christmas in January.” The text message was tied in the indictment report to an envelope marked with Daibes’ return address and delivered to Menendez's residence, containing thousands of dollars and bearing Daibes’ driver’s fingerprints and the DNA of the businessman himself.

Among the items revealed as part of the case and confiscated from their place of residence by the authorities are: US$566,222 in cash; two one-kilogram gold bars; 11 one-ounce gold bars; funds in their accounts; and a 2019 Mercedes-Benz C-Class convertible. Serial numbers revealed that the gold bars were purchased by Hana and Daibes on different occasions, according to the document.While the release of the news created a buzz in US media and a major scandal for the senator, who is not facing his first bribery charges, the Egyptian side remains silent so far, despite the indictment revealing the involvement of Egyptian intelligence, military and government figures.

Seven congressional representatives and five senators from Menendez’s own party have called upon the senator to resign from the Senate. "In the history of the United States Congress, it is doubtful there has ever been a corruption allegation of this depth and seriousness," said Robert Torricelli, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey.

The senator stated in a Monday morning press conference that he has no intention to resign.