Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said that blaming Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez's (D-NJ) wife in his federal corruption trial may be a good thing for his defense.
During an interview with MSNBC, Kirschner praised the Democrat’s legal team for throwing his wife under the bus as a way to protect him.
“Once the cases were severed, you know, there’s a preference in the law for codefendants to be tried together jointly in one trial,” Kirschner said. “That’s true for lots of reasons. Once his wife’s case was severed out, and she’s going to be tried separately in the future, it gives Menendez what I refer to as the empty chair defense. His attorneys will figuratively be pointing to the empty chair where his codefendant, his wife, should be seated if they were being tried jointly, and say ‘She’s the bad person, she’s the guilty one. She did it all and he didn’t know anything about it.’”
In September, Menendez and his wife were charged with conspiracy to commit bribery. Just six months later, the Justice Department announced additional charges against the pair which included obstruction of justice, extortion, and honest services wire fraud.
Menendez’s lawyers accused his wife, Nadine Menendez of “sidelin[ing]” her husband, and withholding information that makes him appear innocent.
On the other hand, Kirschner admitted that Nadine could use the same defense and blame her husband’s corruption on him.
“There is some powerful evidence,” Kirschner said. “Not only $480,000 sort of, you know, hidden away throughout their home, not only, you know, more than 10 gold bars, but some of the evidence is after these gold bars were allegedly given to the senator and his wife, the senator says he knows nothing about it, but some evidence that has been previewed by the prosecutors include Senator Menendez googling, and I quote one-kilo gold bar price. That doesn’t seem to be something you would randomly Google, and I will tell you, I love that kind of evidence and I used it all the time when I was a prosecutor.”