U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, a powerful New Jersey Democrat, has been charged with conspiring with a West Palm Beach eye doctor in a federal public corruption indictment filed Wednesday.
Menendez, former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is accused of accepting private plane flights and other gifts from Dr. Salomon Melgen, a major campaign donor, in exchange for trying to resolve the physician's multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the federal Medicare program.
The Department of Justice filed fraud and bribery charges against Menendez and Melgen in Newark, N.J., capping a two-year probe of his relationship with the ophthalmologist.
Melgen also continues to be under a separate investigation by a federal grand jury in West Palm Beach on allegations that his practice over-billed Medicare by millions of dollars.
Melgen's defense attorneys, Anne Lyons and Maria Dominguez, declined to comment on Wednesday.
Prosecutors and the FBI have been focusing on Menendez's efforts on behalf of his political benefactor, including personally trying to resolve the physician's high-stakes billing dispute with the taxpayer-funded Medicare program. During the period the senator sought to help the doctor, Menendez went on several trips with Melgen to the Dominican Republic on the physician's private plane and stayed at his resort-area home in 2010 — all without reporting the gifts.
As the controversy about their relationship escalated two years ago, the senator quietly wrote a personal check for $58,000 to reimburse Melgen for the two unreported trips. His office later disclosed a third flight, from Florida to New Jersey, indicating the senator had repaid Melgen $11,250.
In early March, amid media reports of the looming indictment, Menendez insisted during a news conference in his home state that he had done nothing wrong.
“Let me be very clear, I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law,” he said. “Every action that I and my office have taken for the last 23 years that I have been privileged to be in the United States Congress has been based on pursuing the best policies for the people of New Jersey and this entire country.”
Menendez is the 12th sitting U.S. senator to be indicted. The last was Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who was convicted in 2008. The Justice Department later dismissed the case, acknowledging that it had withheld key evidence, but not before Stevens lost his Senate seat in a close election.
Now that the indictment is filed, prosecutors will face the difficult challenge of proving that a sitting senator — the first Cuban-American senator who is now in his second term — accepted those gifts from Melgen in exchange for specific favors, starting with intervening on the doctor's behalf with top Health and Human Services officials over the Medicare payments.
Melgen's billing dispute with Medicare — over costly eye injections to treat a disease that causes blindness — became one of the areas of inquiry for the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section in 2013, after federal agents raided his Palm Beach County clinics.
In 2009 and again in 2012, Menendez had complained to top Medicare officials that it was unfair to penalize the doctor because the billing rules for administering the drug, Lucentis, were ambiguous. Melgen had billed Medicare $9 million for the drug, which is used to treat “wet” macular degeneration.
Menendez's official actions on behalf of his longtime friend came to light after federal agents raided Melgen's clinic and two other South Florida offices in late January 2013, which sent shock waves from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey to Washington.
Published reports noted that the doctor had donated more than $700,000 in 2012 to Menendez's reelection campaign and those of other Senate Democrats.
The timing could not have been more sensitive because Menendez was poised to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February. Despite the controversy, he ascended to the post that month.
At that same time, a Miami federal grand jury was convened to consider allegations that Melgen had arranged encounters with prostitutes in his native Dominican Republic while he and Menendez stayed at the doctor's seaside estate in the resort area of Casa de Campo.
The purported prostitutes quickly recanted their original stories alleging the trysts. And the Miami grand jury found no basis to file any charges on that matter, according to law enforcement sources.
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