Nadine Arslanian, the wife of New Jersey’s senior Senator Bob Menendez, cashed in up to $400,000 worth of gold bars. This payout came despite having faced the specter of foreclosure just three years earlier.
She managed to sell the equivalent of 13 pounds of pure gold between April 7th, 2022, and June 16th, 2022, according to the senator’s annual public disclosures. Before she married Menendez in 2020, she had reportedly been in dire straits financially.
As a senator, Menendez is required to declare assets he or Arslanian own valued at more than $1,000. He does not have to say where they came from. For the first year of their marriage, he declared that his wife had checking and savings accounts with a maximum value of $117,000; just before the gold sale, Menendez filed an amendment to the 2020 disclosure revealing Arslanian had up to $250,000 in gold bars.
The sale from last spring was months before Menendez’s office publicly admitted that the East Coast Democrat was facing a new federal investigation. Manhattan federal prosecutors want to ascertain if the senator or his wife received unreported luxury gifts in return for political favors, according to reports.
Menendez was indicted in 2015 after prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Unit accused him of accepting big bribes from Palm Beach ophthalmologist and political benefactor Dr. Salomon Melgen. The case was ultimately dropped due to a mistrial.
