Prosecutors are admitting jurors in the bribery trial of Senator Menendez were able to view evidence they were not supposed to see during deliberations before they found him guilty. The disclosure could help his effort to get the charges thrown out on the grounds that the government showed jurors evidence it should not have during the trial. 

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez, was found guilty on 16 felony charges involving a scheme that two foreign governments and three New Jersey-based businessmen. 

In a legal filing on Wednesday, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York said unredacted evidence a judge had previously ruled could not be shown to jurors was loaded onto a computer and given to jurors during deliberations. 

However, prosecutors said the evidence loaded onto the laptop would have been “meaningless” if jurors had seen it. They also argued it was “vanishingly unlikely” that the jurors saw that specific evidence as the laptop held more than 3,000 exhibits.

Specifically, they said one piece of evidence that should have been redacted was a text message that included an article published by CNN. According to the government, the jurors would have had to examine an extensive spreadsheet that laid out the evidence presented by the prosecutors to see the text message.

The prosecutors said in their letter to the judge that “no action need be taken in light of the error.” Along with other court cases to support their position, they also said Menendez’s defense team could have raised the issue of the evidence being improperly loaded onto the laptop before the deliberations started.

While the prosecutors say there is nothing that needs to be done in light of their letter, the disclosure could help Menendez’s appeal.

Menendez has asked the judge overseeing the trial, Judge Sidney Stein, to throw out his guilty verdict, even though he acknowledges it is “no simple task.”

As Politico notes, his defense team involves a “series of novel legal issues that could eventually send the case to the Supreme Court.” Menendez’s defense attorneys say prosecutors violated privileges granted to lawmakers under the “speech or debate” clause and that during the trial, jurors were shown evidence they should not have seen. 

Although it is still likely a tall order to have his guilty verdict tossed, the disclosure by the prosecutors this week could help further his case that the government acted improperly with the evidence it featured in the trial. 

In response to the prosecutors’ letter this week, Menendez said, “In a letter they filed today, the prosecutors basically admitted that they manipulated the evidence that was given to the jury.”

“The prosecutors gave the jury documents that were misleading and ruled inadmissible by the judge, and they did so by electronically burying the tainted documents on a prosecution-team laptop that was then handed to the jury,” he added.

Menendez has maintained his innocence in the case. However, he resigned his Senate seat in August and ended his re-election bid.

Prosecutors indicted the former senator last year on bribery charges. During the trial, they said his work on behalf of foreign governments began in 2018 — the same year he was acquitted by a federal judge in a different bribery case. 

In the indictment last year, prosecutors included images of gold bars and cash stashed in his home that the FBI found during a raid. On top of 11 1-ounce gold bars, investigators also found $80,000 in cash in a safe deposit box. 

The government says Menendez ghostwrote a letter to his fellow senators urging them to release military aid to Egypt, worked to protect halal certification for a businessman, tried to end the prosecution of a businessman, Fred Daibes,  and interfered in a federal investigation into businessman Jose Uribe. 

Menendez tried to explain the presence of the cash by saying it was a habit after his family’s experience in Cuba. While a forensic accountant testified during the trial that the former senator made $400 cash withdrawals twice a month between 2008 and 2022, there were no withdrawals that would explain the wads of cash found in envelopes around his home. Daibes’ fingerprints were found on some of the envelopes containing cash.

Defense attorneys also insisted the gold bars were only given to Menendez as a gift. However, the assistant U.S. attorney, Paul Monteolin, said, “Friends do not give those same friends kilograms of gold worth $60,000 out of the goodness of their hearts.”