Bob Menendez and the Perils of Dealing with Autocrats

Suppose you are the President of Egypt. You are an autocrat who seized power ten years ago in a military coup, so you need not worry much about elections, parliament, courts, or the domestic news media. You control all of that. Instead of campaigns and legislation, the tools of your trade are patronage, surveillance, and intimidation. You do worry, however, about Washington. The United States gives Egypt more than a billion dollars a year in military aid, and its lawmakers occasionally threaten to withhold some of that to protest your habit of jailing critics and abusing human rights.

Unlike Egypt, though, Washington is open to a fault. Rivalrous politicians across independent branches of government must share power, and to keep their jobs they depend on a porous campaign-finance system dominated by big and often anonymous donors. And a thriving and loosely regulated influence industry is eager for your government’s business—since, after all, you are a close ally. You and your emissaries are welcome in the White House, the Pentagon, and the halls of Congress; U.S. counterintelligence agencies are busy guarding against foes such as China and Russia.

From the perspective of an authoritarian ally such as the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in other words, the openness of the U.S. political system looks like an irresistible invitation. So Egypt’s appearance in the recent corruption indictment of Senator Bob Menendez, of New Jersey, should come as no surprise. Rather, the Menendez affair is a parable of the inherent risk to the U.S. political system posed by alliances with authoritarians, who often try to manipulate it in the extralegal ways they are accustomed to using at home. The lesson is timely because it has come to light just as the Biden Administration appears poised to place a heavy new trust in another allied autocrat, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, of Saudi Arabia.

Arguments about Washington’s authoritarian clients typically center on the supposed tension between our values and our interests. An aphorism attributed to various American Presidents has become shorthand for this trade-off: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Franklin Roosevelt supposedly said this of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal and Mafia-linked dictator of the Dominican Republic. Yet Trujillo also exemplified the ways that corrupt clients corrupt Washington, too. To maintain his “our bastard” status, Trujillo reportedly spent five million dollars in his last years bribing members of Congress—starting at five thousand dollars for a rank and filer and going up to seventy-five thousand for a committee chairman—while furnishing some with sex workers. His agents are also widely blamed for the mysterious 1956 disappearance of a Columbia University professor, Jesús Galíndez, who had written a dissertation critical of the Trujillo dictatorship.

Bernardo Vega, a historian of the Trujillo years who served as the Dominican Ambassador to Washington in the nineteen-nineties, said he was dismayed by the way former members of Congress still sell their services as lobbyists to help the Dominican Republic and other foreign governments sway the votes of current members. “It’s not very moral,” he told me. But, he said, after Trujillo’s death and the advent of democracy, the Dominican Republic had kept its influence campaigns legal. “There have been no cases that I am aware of of bribing people in the United States—aside from paying lobbyists.”

The Menendez indictment suggests that Sisi, whom President Donald Trump once called “my favorite dictator,” began bribing Menendez in 2018. Menendez was the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his then girlfriend, Nadine Arslanian, helped a struggling Egyptian American businessman, Wael Hana, introduce the senator to Egyptian military and intelligence officials. Hana, a Christian, knew little about Islamic dietary requirements. Yet the Egyptian government granted him a novel and highly profitable monopoly on the halal certification of all American food imported to Egypt. Prosecutors say that Hana gave Menendez exercise machines and several hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold bars; Hana also provided an undemanding job, mortgage payments, and a Mercedes-Benz sports car for Arslanian, who in 2020 became Menendez’s wife. (She needed a new car because she had wrecked her previous Mercedes in a collision that killed a pedestrian, which police deemed an accident.)

In turn, according to the indictment, Menendez approved the continued flow of high-tech-weapons sales and military aid to Egypt, and allegedly turned over to Sisi’s agents sensitive information about the number of Egyptians on the payroll of the United States Embassy in Cairo. (Egyptian spies could try to exploit this information to penetrate the Embassy.) Also according to the indictment, he ghostwrote a letter for an Egyptian official to persuade other lawmakers to overlook Cairo’s rights abuses. After an Egyptian military air strike from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter accidentally injured an American tourist in 2015, Menendez appears to have interceded to protect the flow of U.S. aid. (Hana allegedly texted his Egyptian handler: “orders, consider it done.”) Later, in June, 2021, Menendez met privately at a Washington hotel with a top Egyptian intelligence official to prepare him for a meeting the next day with other senators. The senators planned to press the intelligence official about a human-rights concern, and, in a text to another official, Nadine Menendez explained that her husband had let Egyptians “know ahead of time what is being talked about” so that they could prepare “rebuttals.” On Thursday, prosecutors added new charges accusing Hana and both Menendezes of acting as unregistered foreign agents. (The Menendezes and Hana pleaded not guilty to the first indictment; all three maintain that they did nothing wrong. )

It goes without saying that Russian and Chinese spies can’t so easily rendezvous with senior senators; only allies have such access. A look back at the Trump Administration offers several other examples of the United States’ authoritarian allies attempting to subvert or corrupt its political process. Agents of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a strongman who leads a NATO member—were paying the former general Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national-security adviser, as their advocate when he was serving as a Trump campaign fixture. (Flynn, who published an opinion column on Election Day arguing Erdoğan’s cause and only belatedly disclosed the Turkish payments, pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about Russian contacts and was later pardoned by Trump.) After Flynn was exposed, Erdoğan tapped Trump’s Turkish partner in an Istanbul real-estate investment to lobby the White House—and the partner made sure the Turkey-U.S. Business Council held conferences in the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. In 2019, Erdoğan angered U.S. policymakers by buying a Russian air-defense system and attacking a U.S. proxy force in northern Syria. Trump nonetheless hosted him at the White House and proclaimed himself a “big fan” of the Turkish leader.

The United Arab Emirates, a close ally known for its custom of providing lucrative jobs to former U.S. military officers, got caught seeking to use two of Trump’s biggest fund-raisers, Tom Barrack and Elliott Broidy, to influence American policy toward the region. The Justice Department charged Barrack with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the U.A.E., but he was acquitted after arguing that he had been facilitating better relations with an ally. Broidy pleaded guilty to illicit lobbying for Chinese and Malaysian interests—prosecutors left his Emirati ties in the background—and then was pardoned by Trump. The Emirati operative George Nader pleaded guilty to funnelling 3.5 million dollars in illicit contributions to political committees, including Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign; in messages to a straw donor in the scheme, Nader referred to the money as “baklava” for “Big Sister H.” It later emerged that he had been hedging his bets by offering Emirati support to Trump’s campaign team, too. (As I reported earlier this year, the U.A.E. also hired a Swiss private investigator to collect and spread dirt on its perceived enemies in Europe, including an American oil trader living in Italy; private detectives face criminal charges if they work for adversaries such as China or Iran, and open democracies don’t hire them.)

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