Judge won't wipe Bob Menendez's corruption conviction over improper evidence claim

A federal judge on Wednesday denied former Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-N.J.) bid to toss his corruption conviction and receive a new trial because jurors during their deliberations had access to trial exhibits without proper redactions.

Menendez and the two businessmen tried alongside him, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, latched onto the revelation in the hopes that it would compel wiping the jury’s guilty verdict.

“Because the defendants have waived any objection to the improperly redacted contents of the laptop and its submission to the jury and because the defendants were not prejudiced by the improperly redacted material, defendants’ supplemental motions for a new trial are denied,” U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein, who oversaw the trial, wrote in his 14-page ruling.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Menendez, declined to comment. The Hill has reached out to Menendez’s legal team for comment.

Following a nine-week trial, a New York jury in July convicted Menendez on all 16 criminal counts, including bribery and acting as a foreign agent. The former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee resigned the following month and is set to be sentenced on Jan. 29, when federal prosecutors are seeking to imprison him for 15 years.

In November, prosecutors revealed that nine exhibits provided to jurors on a laptop during their deliberations displayed material that should have been redacted. Prosecutors acknowledged the error but insisted the convictions should still stand.

Stein, an appointee of former President Clinton, agreed by ruling the defendants shared responsibility for submitting the proper exhibits. Menendez and the businessmen failed to object before the laptop was sent to the deliberation room, the judge noted.

“Indeed, if these exhibits were as critical as Menendez now claims, surely they would have been amongst the ‘select number of exhibit files’... that the defense read during its review of the laptop, but they were either not read by the defense or the error was not noticed,” Stein wrote.

And even if Menendez could still object, the judge said he wouldn’t be entitled to a new trial because there was only an “infinitesimal chance” the jurors even viewed the mistakenly sent materials. The evidence in question wasn’t “a smoking gun laying in plain view,” anyways, the judge ruled.

“The extra-record material was a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence. All defense counsel as well as the government attorneys—acutely attuned to the evidence in this case—failed to notice the improper redactions during their preparation and review of the jury laptop, and for a full four months thereafter,” Stein wrote.

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