Majority in New Jersey says Menendez should resign now: Survey

A majority of New Jersey residents believe embattled Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) should resign amid a barrage of federal bribery, fraud and extortion charges levied against him, according to a poll released Thursday.

The Monmouth University poll found 63 percent of New Jersey adults think he should resign following an indictment last fall accusing him of accepting bribes to use his power as then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit Egypt and three New Jersey businessmen. A superseding indictment accuses him of accepting gifts from Qatar in a years-long corruption scheme.

About 33 percent of those polled said the senator should be allowed to wait and see how the charges against him are settled, and 4 percent said they don’t know, pollsters found.

Monmouth University compared the poll’s recent findings to surveys taken following Menendez’s 2015 indictment on corruption charges, in which a far smaller share —  28 percent of New Jersey residents — said he should resign. That indictment ended in a mistrial in 2017.

Three-quarters of participants in Monmouth’s latest poll said Menendez is “probably guilty,” while a mere 5 percent said he is “probably not guilty” and 9 percent said they did not know. About 11 percent said they did not know about the recent charges.

Menendez has largely rejected calls from his constituents and colleagues in Congress to resign, though he did step down as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee shortly after the charges were announced last September.

The poll was conducted from Feb. 29 to March 4, one day before prosecutors brought a dozen additional charges against the lawmaker after one of his co-defendants, Jose Uribe, took a plea deal last week and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Menendez is now facing a total of 16 criminal charges, including bribery and obstruction of justice. The new counts are mostly related to the alleged schemes already brought to the surface in previous indictments, but now charge the New Jersey Democrat directly with bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent rather than just conspiracy charges.

Prosecutors are now accusing the defendants of conspiring to cover up the alleged bribery scheme while federal prosecutors investigated the case. This allegation came after Uribe’s guilty plea admitted to conspiring to falsely claim payments he made to Menendez — which were used to secure a Mercedes-Benz convertible — were loans. Prosecutors claim those payments were bribes Menendez accepted after allegedly agreeing to disrupt the investigation into Uribe.

The trial is slated to begin May 6 and will feature Uribe’s testimony as part of his plea deal.

Menendez called the superseding indictment a “flagrant abuse of power” and maintained his innocence.

“The latest charge reveals far more about the government than it says about me,” Menendez said earlier this week. “It says that the prosecutors are afraid of the facts, scared to subject their charges to the fair-minded scrutiny of a jury, and unconstrained by any sense of justice or fair play.”

The Monmouth University poll was conducted Feb. 29 to March 4 with a random sample of 801 New Jersey adults. It has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.

The Hill has reached out to Menendez’s office for comment on the poll.

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