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Jose Uribe, a star government witness with a checkered past, is expected to testify on Tuesday for a third day at Senator Robert Menendez’s bribery trial as the focus of the proceeding shifts toward a series of face-to-face meetings that Mr. Uribe had with the senator.
Mr. Uribe, who has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Mr. Menendez with a Mercedes-Benz, is likely to face hours of cross-examination by defense lawyers about at least one element that was missing from his direct testimony: any discussion with the senator of a payoff.
“I never talked to Mr. Menendez about making payments for the car,” Mr. Uribe said in court on Monday.
Mr. Uribe’s testimony did reveal two private meetings with the senator that were not mentioned in a federal indictment against Mr. Menendez.
And his firsthand account as a witness goes to the heart of the government’s case against Mr. Menendez, a once-powerful Democrat who is in his fifth week of trial. He is charged with accepting cash, gold and the Mercedes-Benz in exchange for meddling in criminal investigations, steering aid to Egypt and propping up a friend’s halal meat certification monopoly.
Nadine Menendez, the senator’s wife, and two New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, are also charged in the bribery conspiracy. All four have pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Uribe, 57, told jurors that he was invited to Ms. Menendez’s home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where he spoke with the senator alone for roughly an hour on the eve of a Sept. 6, 2019, meeting that Mr. Menendez held with a former New Jersey attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal.
Mr. Uribe and the senator poured drinks from a bottle of Grand Marnier brandy that Mr. Uribe had brought as a gift. The senator smoked a cigar and they discussed an insurance fraud investigation that Mr. Uribe testified he wanted Mr. Menendez’s help in quashing.
Before Mr. Uribe left, the senator shook a small bell to summon Ms. Menendez from inside the house; she brought out a piece of paper, and Mr. Uribe said he was instructed to write down the names of the two businesses and the two associates who were targets of the attorney general’s fraud investigation.
The senator folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, Mr. Uribe testified.
At noon the next day, the senator met with Mr. Grewal, who told jurors last week that during the brief sit-down at the senator’s office in Newark he flatly refused Mr. Menendez’s overture to discuss a specific case.
Less than three hours later, however, Mr. Uribe said he was told by Ms. Menendez to meet the senator at his apartment building in New Jersey. The men spoke briefly in the lobby, and Mr. Menendez offered Mr. Uribe reassurance.
“That thing that you asked me about — it doesn’t seem to be anything there,” Mr. Uribe testified the senator told him.
Mr. Uribe is expected to be questioned aggressively on Tuesday about his decision to plead guilty in March — for the second time in 13 years.
In 2011, Mr. Uribe, an insurance broker, admitted taking $76,000 in insurance premiums but failing to buy coverage for seven clients, all commercial drivers. He was sentenced in New Jersey to probation and stripped of his insurance broker’s license.
He testified Monday that he continued to run an insurance broker’s office, in violation of his 2011 guilty plea. He also told jurors that he had failed for years to pay business taxes, had lied about being married on his personal income tax forms and fraudulently obtained two loans to purchase trucking equipment.
In an opening statement last month, one of the senator’s lawyers, Avi Weitzman, said of Mr. Uribe: “We’ll have a lot to discuss at the end of the case about him — about his lies and his cheating and his crimes and all the ways he’s been incentivized to continue doing all of them.”
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