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Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were both charged last fall in a broad federal corruption case, in which they were accused of accepting cash and gold bribes.
Now their marriage is at the center of a new dispute in the case, according to legal papers filed late Monday.
Ms. Menendez is asking a Manhattan judge to sever her case from that of her husband. In her request, she said that she understood Senator Menendez might wish to testify at his trial, “and that his testimony could include revealing confidential marital communications with Ms. Menendez that Senator Menendez deems essential and material to his defense.”
Ms. Menendez wants to maintain the confidentiality of her communications with her husband, her lawyers wrote to the judge, Sidney H. Stein, of Federal District Court.
If they were tried together, the lawyers said, “the court would be presented with an irreconcilable conflict between husband and wife with respect to the admissibility of confidential marital communications.”
The unusual request comes after Mr. Menendez took to the floor of the Senate a week ago to offer an aggressive rebuttal to the charges against him. He, his wife and a New Jersey businessman, Wael Hana, have all been accused of participating in a conspiracy to exchange political favors for gold bars; to act as an unregistered agent of Egypt; to take bribes to help the government of Qatar; and to try to block criminal investigations of allies in New Jersey.
“I am innocent,” Mr. Menendez said in the Senate, “and I intend to prove my innocence.”
His lawyers filed a brief the next day, on Jan. 10, asking that Mr. Menendez’s charges be dismissed on grounds that overzealous prosecutors were criminalizing normal legislative activity and violating the constitutional protections afforded to members of Congress.
Mr. Menendez could still file additional legal papers on Monday night, the deadline for defense motions in the case. The United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York will have an opportunity to respond to the defense’s arguments when it files its legal briefs, which are due by Feb. 5.
Nicholas V. Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment Monday.
The Menendezes and Mr. Hana have all pleaded not guilty. So have two other New Jersey businessmen, who also face charges.
Ms. Menendez’s lawyers argued that allowing the couple to be tried separately would enable the senator “to fully exercise his constitutional right to testify in his own defense, without subjecting Ms. Menendez to unfair prejudice.”
Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law, said, “The backdrop for all of this is that prosecutors and courts hate trying the same case twice. They’ll look for any way to protect the rights of both defendants in a single trial.”
In most cases, Professor Gillers said, that can be done through an instruction to the jury that it consider certain testimony only in regards to the senator, for example, and not against Ms. Menendez.
“The jury takes an oath to honor those limiting instructions,” he added.
The senator married Ms. Menendez, his second wife, in 2020 after a whirlwind romance. She is central to the bribery conspiracy, according to prosecutors, who outlined the charges in three successive indictments, the most recent one issued this month.
They met years before and began dating soon after the conclusion of an earlier federal corruption trial of Mr. Menendez, which took place in New Jersey and ended in a hung jury in 2017. Federal prosecutors there declined to retry the senator after a judge threw out the most serious charges.
Mr. and Ms. Menendez continue to live in the split-level home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where she raised her two adult children. It was in that home, and a safe deposit box rented by Ms. Menendez, where investigators found more than $550,000 in cash, 13 gold bars and a new Mercedes-Benz that prosecutors say was given to Ms. Menendez as a bribe.
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