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Embattled Sen. Bob Menendez is facing a new perfect storm of legal and political troubles — splitting from the super-lawyer defending him against charges of bribery, and seeing his polls plummet.
The New Jersey Democrat quietly split from his longtime powerhouse lawyer Abbe Lowell — who secured his acquittal on previous bribery charges — and instead signed up with Washington-based attorney Robert Luskin.
Ironically for an indictee fighting charges that he took bribes in gold bars, Luskin himself was once paid in gold bars by another client — earning him the nickname “Gold Bar Bob,” the same as the senator’s.
Menendez, 69, who has been in the political arena for half a century and a member of the US Senate since 2006, is facing record low poll numbers, with 70 percent of Garden State voters saying he should resign.
The Democrat’s latest troubles began in June 2022, when federal agents raided his Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home and found gold bars, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed into the pockets of Menendez’s jackets.
Menendez, his second wife, Nadine Arslanian, and three associates — one of them a developer called Fred Daibes — were indicted in October on charges of bribery and conspiring to act as foreign agents for Egypt. All five deny all charges.
Menendez, his second wife, Nadine Arslanian, and a developer called Fred Daibes were indicted in October on charges of bribery and conspiring to act as foreign agents for Egypt. The three deny all charges.
Also charged is Egyptian American Wael Hana and New Jersey businessman Jose Uribe. They too deny all charges.
Prosecutors allege that Hana was introduced by Arslanian to Menendez in 2020, before the couple married.
Wael’s company, IG Halal, which is run out of Daibes’ Edgewater office building, was operated with financial backing from Daibes, according to court records.
Menendez was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee until he stepped down after the first federal indictment accusing him of bribery was unveiled in September.
However, he has rebuffed demands from his Democratic Senate colleagues and some of New Jersey’s most powerful party members, including Gov. Phil Murphy, to resign entirely. Murphy’s wife, Tammy, has announced she will run against Menendez in the 2024 Democratic primary for his seat.
In October, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 80 percent of Republicans favor the senator stepping down, along with 71 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of independent voters. Only 16 percent said he should remain in office. Menendez has said he will not resign.
He is facing a political and legal fight without Lowell, the bare-knuckled brawler Washington power lawyer who also represents Hunter Biden, by his side.
On Nov. 16, two lawyers working for the Chicago-based law firm that includes Lowell withdrew from Menendez’s case, court documents say.
No explanation was given for Lowell’s withdrawal. Lowell did not return The Post’s request for comment this week, and Luskin refused comment Wednesday.
But Lowell had guided Menendez’s defense when he stood trial in Newark federal court in 2017 on charges of conspiracy, bribery, honest services fraud and false statements over alleged payments from a Medicare fraudster. That ended with a hung jury and prosecutors chose not retry the senator.
Now Luskin will represent him when he appears next in federal court in Manhattan. His wife has her own legal team.
Luskin, 73, was himself once paid with 45 gold bars by a precious metals dealer who was convicted of laundering money for Colombian drug cartels.
The Harvard graduate earned the moniker “Gold Bar Bob” after accepting a $500,000 legal payment while appealing the 1993 conviction of Stephen Saccoccia, a Rhode Island precious metals dealer who laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s.
Saccoccia was slapped with a 660-year prison sentence, while in 1998 Luskin agreed to forfeit $245,000 in his fees to settle a case brought by federal prosecutors against him.
“While I settled with the government, with absolutely no admission of liability or wrongdoing, my colleagues fought the government efforts and the U.S. Court of Appeals twice ruled that the government was not entitled to forfeit these assets,” Luskin told The Post last week.
Luskin, who owns homes in Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard, also represented Lance Armstrong in the disgraced cyclist’s doping case, as well as a host of White House insiders of both parties.
They include President George W. Bush’s polling guru Karl Rove, and Mark Middleton, a former aide to President Bill Clinton with ties to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Middleton committed suicide at his home in Arkansas last year
In addition to Luskin, Menendez will be represented by Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, who represented then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in an independent investigation of the Bridgegate affair.
The 2013-14 scandal saw appointees of Christie conspire to create traffic jams in Fort Lee, NJ, by shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge as political payback.
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