Menendez ‘was helping the Egyptians, who were accessories to the crime,’ upcoming book reports
Former senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) often accused President Donald Trump of covering up the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi during the final years of his political career, going so far as accusing Trump of “sacrificing the integrity of his own intelligence agencies” to placate the Saudis in a February 2021 press release.
But when it came time to pad his own pockets, Menendez didn’t hesitate to throw Khashoggi under the bus. In June 2021, not long after the disgraced Democratic senator denigrated Trump’s integrity, Menendez covertly helped the head of Egypt’s intelligence apparatus prepare “rebuttals” to forthcoming congressional scrutiny about allegations that Egypt provided Saudi assassins with the cocktail of deadly drugs they used to carry out Khashoggi’s murder, according to excerpts of an upcoming book reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It was all part of Menendez’s duties as an illegal foreign agent for Egypt, work he performed in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold bars, cash, and car and mortgage payments.
The bombshell revelation is detailed in the upcoming book, Gold Bar Bob: The Downfall of the Most Corrupt U.S. Senator by New York Post reporter Isabel Vincent and researcher Tom Anderson.
“Publicly, Menendez was on the side of justice—a crusader for human rights,” Vincent and Anderson write. “Privately, he was helping the Egyptians, who were accessories to the crime.”
The book details a private briefing Menendez provided to Abbas Kamel, the then-chief of Egyptian intelligence, at a Washington, D.C., hotel on June 21, 2021. Kamel was scheduled to meet with U.S. lawmakers the next day, and Menendez took it upon himself to warn the Egyptian spy chief that he would be probed about Egypt’s alleged involvement in the Khashoggi assassination during those meetings.
As Menendez met with Kamel, the senator’s wife, Nadine Arslanian, texted the Egyptian spy chief a copy of an article by Yahoo News correspondent Michael Isikoff to give him the ammunition he needed to prepare “rebuttals” to the lawmakers planning to ask questions about Khashoggi.
“I just thought it would be better to know ahead of time what is being talked about and this way you can prepare your rebuttals,” Menendez’s wife wrote to Kamel.
It worked. Kamel met with Menendez’s congressional colleagues, but nothing appears to have come of their questioning concerning Khashoggi. A lengthy Politico article covering Kamel’s meetings with U.S. lawmakers made no mention of Khashoggi.
Two days after Menendez privately briefed Kamel, on June 23, Egyptian-American businessman Wael Hana purchased 22 1-ounce gold bars. It was Hana who provided much of Egypt’s bribes to Menendez, and two of the gold bars he purchased on June 23 were subsequently found when the FBI executed a search warrant at Menendez’s New Jersey home one year later in June 2022, the book reports.
Menendez, who failed in his last-ditch efforts to secure a presidential pardon from Trump, reported to federal prison in June to serve an 11-year sentence for illegally acting as a foreign agent for Egypt in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, paid in the form of gold bars, cash, and mortgage and car payments. Hana was convicted alongside Menendez in 2024 and was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison in January. Menendez’s wife, Arslanian, was found guilty on 15 counts for her involvement in the bribery scheme during a separate trial that concluded in April.
Menendez’s role in helping Egypt cover up its alleged involvement in the Khashoggi murder was detailed extensively during his federal trial in 2024, but it will likely be news to those that followed the press’s coverage of the trial.
That’s because major news outlets largely ignored that aspect of the trial in their reporting, including prominent outlets that often wielded the Khashoggi murder as a cudgel to attack the first Trump administration.
That includes the Washington Post, whose editorial board accused the Trump administration of “abetting a Saudi coverup of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder” and asked, “Will Congress go along?” in a November 2018 op-ed.
Federal prosecutors, in their January 2025 sentencing memo seeking 15 years imprisonment for Menendez, detailed the New Jersey Democrat’s own role in a cover-up. They laid out in the public document how he helped Egypt conceal its part in the murder of the Washington Post editorial board’s slain colleague.
Menendez “also briefed the head of Egyptian intelligence on questions other U.S. Senators were preparing to ask regarding reports that Egypt had aided in a notorious human rights abuse, the murder and dismemberment of a U.S. lawful permanent resident journalist,” the Menendez sentencing memo reads. “He did so, in the explicit words of his codefendant wife, so that the head of Egyptian intelligence could prepare his ‘rebuttals.'”
But the Washington Post made no mention of Khashoggi in its Jan. 11 coverage of the prosecutors’ sentencing memo. In fact, the publication cited the very paragraph detailing Menendez’s briefing with Kamel, but used a quote that kept out any reference to Khashoggi.
The same goes for the New York Times, which has mentioned Khashoggi in over 2,000 articles since 2018, according to LexisNexis. But it didn’t mention Khashoggi when it covered the prosecutors’ sentencing memo against Menendez in January.
Gold Bar Bob: The Downfall of the Most Corrupt U.S. Senator will be released on Oct. 14.
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