By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -Prosecutors pursuing a corruption case against Bob Menendez on Thursday brought a new charge against the Democratic U.S. senator, accusing him of engaging in a conspiracy to act as a foreign agent for the Egyptian government.
The new charge was included in a revised indictment filed against the senator for New Jersey in federal court in Manhattan that includes four counts against Menendez. His trial on corruption charges will begin in May.
Prosecutors have said that Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for using their influence to interfere with law enforcement probes of three New Jersey businessmen as well as aid the Egyptian government.
The new indictment accuses the senator, until recently the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of taking actions from 2018 to 2022 on behalf of Egyptian military and intelligence officials without registering with the U.S. Department of Justice as a foreign agent.
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, individuals must register with the department if they act as “an agent of a foreign principle.”
Prosecutors have said that a co-defendant, Wael Hana, arranged meetings between the senator and Egyptian officials, who pressed him to sign off on military aid. In return, the businessman put Nadine Menendez on the payroll of a company he controlled.
The new indictment said both Hana and Nadine Menendez communicated requests and directives from Egyptian officials to the senator.
“The new allegation that Wael Hana was part of a plot concocted over dinner to enlist Senator Menendez as an agent of the Egyptian government is as absurd as it is false,” Hana’s lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, said in a statement.
A lawyer for Menendez did not respond to a request for comment.
The senator has resisted calls for his resignation and has pleaded not guilty the prior charges against him as have his wife, Hana and their co-defendants, businessmen Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Kanishka Singh and Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Mark Porter and Lisa Shumaker)
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