Menendez co-defendant ordered lawyer to pay mortgage for senator’s wife, witness testifies

Wael "Will" Hana, right, and his attorney Ricardo Solano walk into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse in Manhattan on Monday, May 20, 2024. Hana is charged alongside New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez in a wide-ranging corruption scheme dating back to 2018. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

A few months after prosecutors allege Sen. Bob Menendez helped his friend Wael “Will” Hana snag a lucrative monopoly on U.S. halal beef exports to Egypt, the businessman’s attorney paid more than $20,000 to help the senator’s wife avoid foreclosure on her Englewood Cliffs home, the attorney testified Monday.

John Moldovan, who briefly worked as in-house counsel for IS EG Halal after Hana launched the company in 2019, also told jurors that the company became profitable quickly, raking in $311,400 in its first month alone. Business was so good that Hana quickly expanded to several other countries, securing monopolies there, too, by telling officials in at least one country, Uruguay, that IS EG was a “government agency” and Egypt had exclusively authorized it to certify halal beef for export there, Moldovan said.

As the second week of Menendez’s bribery trial started Monday in Manhattan, prosecutors continued to focus on Hana’s role in the wide-ranging scheme that landed New Jersey’s senior senator at the defense table on corruption charges for the second time in the past decade. His first trial in 2017 ended in a hung jury.

Prosecutors who indicted Menendez last fall say the Democrat, who helmed the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee until shortly after his indictment, put U.S. security at risk and acted as a foreign agent for Egypt. They say he and his wife, Nadine, accepted bribes of cash and gold bars to help Hana secure the monopoly, release military aid and arms to Egypt, and do other favors for both Hana and various Egyptian officials.

Under questioning by prosecutor Eli Mark, Moldovan told jurors he first met Hana in the spring of 2019 through his best friend, Rony Daibes, an information technology professional who also worked for Hana and is a cousin of real estate developer Fred Daibes, one of Menendez’s co-defendants.

Moldovan told jurors they lived in the same Edgewater apartment building and became friends who partied, exercised, and worked together in a new office Fred Daibes built on River Road, which stretches along an upscale stretch of the Hudson River that’s known as the “Gold Coast.”

Though he had just three or four employees at the time, Hana seemed worldly, telling Moldovan he had met Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and had daily calls with an Egyptian general about the exports, Moldovan said.

Moldovan said he accompanied Hana to Uruguay in 2019 to set up halal certification operations there and rebuffed a Uruguayan official who asked if a local company could do the job, telling her IS EG Halal was “a government agency” the Egyptian government “exclusively authorized … to certify halal products for export to Egypt and the Middle East.”

IS EG Halal has since expanded to Brazil, New Zealand, Dubai, and India, according to James Bret Tate, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official who testified Friday and Monday.

Moldovan met Nadine Menendez around that time, and while she was Hana’s longtime friend, he introduced her to Moldovan as “a new client who needed help in a foreclosure issue,” the lawyer testified.

“She said that the bank was essentially going to foreclose on her house and essentially that Will was going to pay her outstanding debt,” he said.

Hana wired Moldovan money from a business account, and the attorney paid “$23,000 to $24,000” from his personal account to stop foreclosure proceedings, he testified.

By the end of the summer, Hana fired Moldovan. He didn’t explain why, but Mark is expected to continue questioning him Tuesday.

Defense attorneys said during their opening statements last week that the money and gold Hana gave the Menendezes were gifts and accused prosecutors of criminalizing gift-giving.

Alicia Menendez, the senator’s daughter who works as an MSNBC anchor, sat in the first row of spectator seats behind the defendants all day Monday and listened to testimony but declined to talk to the press.

‘The love email’

U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein bookended the day’s proceedings Monday with two rulings that don’t bode well for Menendez.

He denied defense attorneys’ motion to bar what he called “the love email,” a text full of heart emojis Menendez sent his wife that reads: “Tell Will I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today.”

Defense attorney Adam Fee had argued the communication was protected under the constitution’s speech and debate clause, which is essentially an immunity that protects lawmakers from being prosecuted for official legislative acts.

Stein rejected that.

“‘Tell Will I am going to sign off this sale to Egypt today’ is a promise,” Stein said. “Promises to perform acts are not legislative acts.”

Stein also denied the defense’s request to call psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum, who they aimed to ask about the senator’s mental health. The defense team has said that Menendez has untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from his father’s suicide and his experience as the son of refugees who fled Cuba with nothing. Rosenbaum would have testified that his mental disorder created a fear of scarcity that led Menendez to cope by hoarding cash at home.

But Stein said he saw nothing in Rosenbaum’s resume showing she is an expert in PTSD or coping mechanisms, nor any evaluations or justifications she made for her conclusions. Her proffered testimony “bears a startlingly strong resemblance to” comments Menendez made in September about stockpiling cash at home, he said.

“Dr. Rosenbaum, were she permitted to testify, would essentially be reciting to the jury the same background, details, and conclusions that Menendez will be able to tell the jury himself if he so chooses to testify in his defense,” the judge said. “To be sure, Mr. Menendez is under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to testify, but the proposed expert testimony is an effort to transmit the defendant’s story to the jury without his deciding to take the stand and be subject to cross-examination, while at the same time adding a patina of expert opinion to his lay testimony.”

Earlier Monday, Stein scolded attorneys for filing a “frenzied flurry of documents” over the weekend and told them such “midnight-express submissions” must end.

“I simply cannot do my job if I get motions that need immediate attention at 1 a.m. in the morning,” he said. “I don’t know if the parties are engaging in games here. If so, they should stop.”

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