At least four gold bars that federal investigators recovered during their search of Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) home are directly linked to one of the men accused of bribing Menendez.
In 2013, businessman Fred Daibes filed a police report stating that he was the victim of an armed robbery and that the assailants took $500,000 in cash from him and nearly two dozen gold bars.
Police later caught the suspects and Daibes’ property was returned to him, including the gold bars. According to Daibes, who had to sign a document certifying that the property was his, the gold bars all had unique serial numbers that would never be duplicated onto another gold bar.
“Each gold bar has its own serial number,” he told investigators at the time. “They’re all stamped … you’ll never see two stamped the same way.”
Four of the gold bars that investigators recovered from Menendez’s home have the same serial numbers as four of the 22 gold bars that were stolen and later returned to Daibes.
Daibes was charged in the federal indictment for allegedly conspiring to bribe Menendez and conspiring to commit fraud.
The indictment says that Menendez and his wife had a corrupt relationship with New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes, who allegedly gave the senator bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to the DOJ, the bribes were intended to protect the businessmen and to benefit Egypt.
NBC legal analyst Danny Cevallas said, “All of this spells bad news for Senator Menendez because the chain of custody – it appears – is going to be really easy to prove up.”
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) called for Menendez to be expelled from the Senate last week after the U.S. House of Representatives expelled now-former Rep. George Santos (R-NY).
“Senator Menendez, he needs to go,” Fetterman said. “And if you are going to expel Santos, how can you allow somebody like Menendez to remain in the Senate? And, you know, Santos is kind of, lies were almost, you know, funny. And like, you know, he, you know, landed on the moon and that kind of stuff.”
“Whereas, you know, I think, you know, Menendez, I think is really a senator for Egypt. You know, not New Jersey. So I really think he needs to go,” Fetterman said. “He has the right for his day in court and all that, but he doesn’t have the right to have those kinds of votes and things that — that’s not a right. And I think we need to make that kind of decision to send him out.”