Feds: Menendez sold Senate office 'for a life of luxury he couldn't afford'

NEWARK, N.J. – U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez used the power of his office to advance the “financial interests and personal whims” of a wealthy Florida eye doctor who bribed the senator with access to a lifestyle that read “like a travel brochure for the rich and famous,” a prosecutor said Wednesday in federal court.

“This case is about a corrupt politician who sold his Senate office for a life of luxury he couldn’t afford, and a greedy doctor who put that politician on his payroll for whenever he needed the services of a United States senator,” Peter Koski, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, said in his opening statement at Menendez’s corruption trial.

Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, faces a dozen charges related to the bribery scheme. Prosecutors accuse him of soliciting and accepting free trips on ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen’s private jet to luxurious resorts in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to help his 2012 reelection campaign, and other lavish gifts.

In exchange for Melgen’s largesse, prosecutors say, Menendez did his bidding in Washington: helping obtain visas for the doctor’s foreign girlfriends, pressuring an assistant secretary of state to protect Melgen’s port security contract in the Dominican Republic, and lobbying fellow senators and the highest-ranking health policy officials in the Obama administration to try to sway a Medicare billing dispute in the doctor’s favor.

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