Witness: Menendez turned 'hostile' while lobbying for friend

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez hung up on a high-ranking Obama appointee during a 2009 phone call in which the official refused to yield to arguments about a Medicare reimbursement policy that could cost the senator's friend millions of dollars, the official testified Monday.

The “hostile” nature of the interaction, according to Jonathan Blum, former principal deputy administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), was repeated three years later when Menendez failed to make headway on the same issue during a meeting with Blum, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Reid’s office on Capitol Hill.

“It ended quite angrily,” Blum said of the August 2012 meeting, during testimony at Menendez's federal corruption trial in Newark. “Senator Menendez was clearly not happy with the responses that were given” and vowed to use his authority as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees CMS, “to press the issue going forward,” Blum said.

Whether Menendez ever did so was not discussed in court Monday. But prosecutors used the interactions between Blum and Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, to build their case that the senator illegally performed official acts on behalf of Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor and longtime friend, in exchange for gifts and political contributions.

Read more: http://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2017/10/02/witness-menendez-turned-hostile-while-lobbying-friend/724893001/