A Senator’s New Wife and Her Old Friends Draw Prosecutors’ Attention
But their whirlwind romance has taken a sudden dark turn.
Mr. Menendez, the 69-year-old Democratic chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, is under investigation by the Justice Department for the second time in less than a decade. And this time, his wife is also in prosecutors’ cross hairs.
The new inquiry, led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, appears to be focused at least in part on the possibility that either the senator or his wife received undisclosed gifts from a company run by a friend of Ms. Menendez, and that those gifts might have been given in exchange for political favors, according to two people with knowledge of the matter and subpoenas issued in the case.
Unlike her husband, who took a seat on a New Jersey school board as a 20-year-old and rose to prominence in Hudson County’s famously sharp-elbowed political scrum, Ms. Menendez, 56, has lived a mainly private life.
She holds a master’s degree in French language and civilization from New York University, but did not work outside the home while raising her two children in Bergen County, N.J., according to court records and longtime friends. She is described by friends, acquaintances and two former lawyers in much the same way: social, smart and highly fashion-conscious.
She struggled financially after a 2005 divorce and even faced foreclosure. But by 2020, the year she and Mr. Menendez were married, she had formed an international consulting company, and her assets included bars of gold bullion then valued at as much as $250,000.
Source: The New York Times
