The American senator Bob Menendez, the ardent supporter of the formerly designated terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq, was found guilty of bribery and corruption.
Top United States Senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of all 16 criminal counts he faced in a widely watched corruption trial in New York, including bribery and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
A Manhattan federal court jury delivered its verdict on Tuesday after deliberating for more than 12 hours over three days, reported Aljazeera.
Prosecutors had accused Menendez, a New Jersey lawmaker and an influential figure in the Democratic Party, of taking part in overlapping bribery schemes in which he and his wife accepted bribes from three businessmen who wanted Menendez’s help.
According to the reports, in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and car and mortgage payments, Menendez helped steer billions of dollars in US aid to Egypt, where one of the businessmen, Wael Hana, had ties to government officials, according to prosecutors.
Menendez also was accused of seeking to influence criminal probes involving two other businessmen, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe.
In March 2024, 15444 Eli Clifton of The Intercept reported that the smaller contributions to Menendez Legal Defense Fund, might appear to come from a smattering of individual donors. An analysis of the donor rolls by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, however, shows that about 15 percent of the people who gave to Menendez — including Moeinimanesh and Afshari — are linked to an Iranian exile group called the Mojahedin e-Khalq, or MEK.
Menendez and the MEK have a relationship going back a decade. Shortly after the group was removed from a State Department list of “foreign terror organizations,” Menendez advocated for the MEK following an attack on its members by the Iraqi government.
Menendez’s elevation of the group as a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic continued since then. The senator met with its leader, Maryam Rajavi, last May and heaped praise on the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a so-called political wing indistinguishable from the MEK, at a 2022 Capitol Hill event organized by the Organization of Iranian American Communities, a group allied with the MEK.
The intercept found out that in total, MEK-affiliated individuals made up approximately 5 percent of the total funds raised, over $20,000, by the end of January. (Seven other donors, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the OIAC, and Menendez’s office did not respond to requests of the Intercept for comment.)