Nancy Solomon
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nancy Solomon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And Lawrence has worked for nearly every major Democratic candidate in New Jersey for the past 40-odd years. He worked for Menendez the longest. That's like 18 inches of files. Well, and there's boxes. I mean, don't forget this goes on since 1982. And he was working for Menendez when the senator ran into trouble with the gifts from the eye doctor.
But it's an interesting idea that was that a breaking point where he felt like, okay, they're going to treat me like this, that I'm going to really get everything I'm due.
The case ended in a hung jury, and Menendez walked out of the courthouse defiant, as if he'd been entirely exonerated.
The trial was also a pretty pivotal time in the senator's personal life. He and his fiancée broke up right before the trial began. And soon after the hung jury, he fell for someone new. He had met Nadine Arslanian at his usual breakfast spot, the IHOP in Union City. Voicemails from Nadine were entered as evidence in the second trial. I can't wait for you to hold my hand and go to sleep.
Nadine Narslanian was born in Beirut. Her parents were Armenian. They moved to New York in the late 1970s. She studied French culture and civilization at NYU and speaks French and Arabic. Nadine was a stay-at-home mom, raising her kids in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and she liked a certain lifestyle.
She drove her kids to a private French school in Manhattan and has been spotted with cast members of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. By the time she met Bob Menendez, she was long divorced. And by all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance.
Twenty months after they began dating, Bob proposed to Nadine in front of the Taj Mahal.
He's known for his crooning, and the YouTube video of this one has been viewed 86,000 times. Nicholas Charvalati, who recalled Menendez kicking his chair over in a meeting, understands what it might have felt like when Menendez began dating Nadine. As a former elected official himself, he gets the financial strain. Unlike plenty of politicians, Menendez is a guy who has never had a lot of money.
Bob Menendez had a new girlfriend and Nadine needed money. She had financial problems and would soon face foreclosure of her home. Tracy Tully, the New York Times reporter, says the bribery case began with a friendship between Nadine and an Egyptian-American who was just as broke as she was, one of the co-defendants, Will Hanna.
They both speak Arabic and were part of what you could call a lonely hearts club that often spent multiple nights a week hanging out in Bergen County restaurants.
Halal meat certification. These companies inspect meat butchering facilities to ensure that the process is done according to Muslim rules. It's like kosher, but it's halal. The Egyptian government chooses the businesses that certify meat imports into their country. And Wilhana, Nadine's friend, was trying to work his connections in Egypt to get one of those contracts.
But for a couple of years, prosecutors say he couldn't get any traction until Nadine started dating Menendez, the top Democrat of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Hi, it's me calling my very handsome senator. And within weeks, Nadine asks Menendez for a favor. Hopefully. that he meet with a high-level Egyptian official. And many meetings did happen.
Many of them included Hanna, the halal meat guy. And...
But Larry Lussberg, Hana's defense attorney, says his client was able to get the Egyptian monopoly on the strength of Hana's own connections and business acumen. He's appealing the conviction.
Regardless, Hanna and another co-defendant were convicted of bribing Menendez in part with the money made by the lucrative halal business. And the senator was convicted of three main things. One, he made calls to an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help Hanna maintain the monopoly. That's the quid pro quo, what he did for the bribes.
Two, he also contacted state and federal prosecutors and complained about criminal investigations against two of the men paying him off. That's obstruction of justice. And three, the Egyptian government gave Hanna the monopoly, and Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, released a hold on military aid to Egypt. That's the acting as a foreign agent charge.
Menendez was convicted on all counts and resigned from the Senate. He's now on the verge of becoming the first senator to go to prison in more than 40 years. Or maybe not.
When he emerged from the sentencing, Menendez made his direct pitch to Donald Trump that his prosecution is just as wrong as Trump's. That was January 29th of this year, and it seemed far-fetched that Bob Menendez, a progressive who voted to impeach the president, would get a pardon from him.
But two weeks later, Trump's Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop their case against the Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.
Chara Torres-Spellacy teaches at the Stetson University College of Law in Florida. She writes about political corruption.
Showing 21–40 of 45 · page 2 of 3
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