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The Justice Department\u2019s allegations that\u00a0Sen.\u00a0Bob Menendez\u00a0for years abused his position as the Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to illicitly benefit the Egyptian government are putting\u00a0heightened scrutiny on the circumstances surrounding recent U.S. actions taken toward Cairo.The DOJ\u00a0has accused Menendez, D-N.J., and his wife, Nadine Menendez, of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for the senator, with help from his wife, using his position from 2018 to 2022 to benefit the Egyptian government, including on foreign military financing and foreign military sales.\u201cIt\u2019s a devastating series of allegations and as a committee we now have a responsibility to understand what Egypt was doing and what Egypt thought it was getting,\u201d Sen.\u00a0Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., who chairs the Foreign Relations Middle East subcommittee and has called on Menendez to resign, told reporters Tuesday. \u201cThere are serious implications for U.S. policy towards Egypt if, as the indictment suggests, they were trying to use illicit means to curry favor on the committee.\u201dMenendez, New Jersey\u2019s senior senator, relinquished his position as Senate Foreign Relations chairman last week and pleaded not guilty to the charges in court on Wednesday.He is accused of\u00a0providing Egyptian officials sensitive information about U.S. embassy employees in Cairo; ghost-writing a letter for Egyptian officials to U.S. senators, asking them to support the release of $300 million in aid; and approving or removing holds on foreign military financing and exports of defense equipment to Egypt.\u201cOf course, there is the issue of Sen. Menendez being corrupt,\u201d said Nancy Okail, president of the liberal Center for International Policy think-tank, who studies Egyptian military corruption, noting he hasn\u2019t been found guilty. \u201cSeeing this as only an individual case of one corrupt person is a mistake. This is part of a corrupting relationship between the U.S. and Egypt in the way they think and deal and manage the foreign aid to Egypt. It is transactional. It is not strategic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House foreign affairs panels have the option to place holds on large foreign weapons sales and the transfer of Foreign Military Financing funds, which are\u00a0grants the State Department\u00a0provides to foreign governments to buy\u00a0U.S. weapons.Menendez\u2019 declining to place holds in Egypt\u2019s case \u2014 he did do so\u00a0on Turkey and Saudi Arabia over human rights abuses \u2014 took on added significance in recent years.As the authoritarian government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came under criticism for its crackdowns on political opposition and human rights activists, a growing number of Democrats, led by Murphy,\u00a0called for holding back annual security assistance.Murphy protested the Biden administration\u2019s decision this month to give Egypt\u00a0a national security waiver to\u00a0receive $235 million. Lawmakers used\u00a0the fiscal 2022 appropriations deal to make\u00a0$320 million in aid\u00a0contingent upon Cairo\u00a0meeting certain human rights benchmarks, but Congress also allowed the administration to use a waiver for up to $235 million. The\u00a0remaining $85 million was withheld.\u201cThe administration has provided a waiver on $235 million to Egypt,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cI would hope that our committee would consider using any ability it has to put a pause on those dollars pending an inquiry into what Egypt was doing.\u201dSecretary of State Antony Blinken sidestepped a question last Friday on whether the release of the $235 million should be revisited in light of the DOJ\u2019s allegations about Egypt\u2019s corrupt influence operations campaign.\u201cThis is obviously an active and ongoing legal matter, so you\u2019ll understand that I have no comment on it,\u201d\u00a0Blinken said.Sen.\u00a0Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., who became\u00a0acting chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee this week, told reporters Thursday he was getting briefed by administration officials on plans for the $235 million but said he would place a hold if he deemed it necessary on disbursement of the funds before the fiscal year ends Saturday. Cardin, who signed a July letter led by Murphy opposing the release of the human rights-conditioned funds to Egypt, emphasized he hadn\u2019t made a decision one way or the other on a hold.The vast majority of the roughly $1.3 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Egypt is through\u00a0FMF grants. Since fiscal 2012, Congress has placed democracy and human rights-related conditions on the release of differing amounts of that yearly largesse. Sisi came to power in 2013 in a military takeover that toppled\u00a0the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi, though the U.S. didn\u2019t\u00a0call it a coup.\u201cThroughout my time in Congress, I have remained steadfast on the side of civil society and human rights defenders in Egypt,\u201d\u00a0Menendez said Monday in New Jersey, where\u00a0he defended himself against the charges. \u201cIf you look at my actions related to Egypt during the period described in this indictment, and throughout my whole career, my record is clear and consistent in holding Egypt accountable for its unjust detention of American citizens and others, its human rights abuses, its deepening relationship with Russia and efforts that have eroded the independence of the nation\u2019s judiciary.\u201dOkail agreed Menendez had criticized Sisi\u2019s human rights record but noted he appears to have stopped doing so around the time he is alleged to have begun accepting bribes.\u201cGoing back to the records of Menendez, he used to criticize Sisi. He used to even write letters and call for holding aid on human rights conditions,\u201d\u00a0she said. \u201cThen he stopped, starting in 2019. So this is a curious case. He is saying he always criticized Egypt. There is a timeline and that timeline coincides when he started getting bribes from the Egyptian government in one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One former lawmaker, a long-time critic of Egypt\u2019s human rights record, is questioning anew the circumstances that undermined his legislative efforts to press for greater accountability toward Cairo.\u201cI got several tough-on-Egypt provisions into House-passed defense bills, which were then stripped in the Senate,\u201d former Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., wrote last Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter. \u201cI still don\u2019t know why. But the idea that the chairman of the SFRC may then have been in a corrupt relationship with Egypt is horrifying.\u201dMalinowski, a House member from 2019 to 2023 and a top human rights official at the State Department during the Obama administration, said in an email that five provisions spread out over the fiscal 2021, 2022 and 2023 House National Defense Authorization measures got dropped in conference negotiations with the Senate.One fiscal 2021 provision would have required the State Department to determine whether the Egyptian government\u2019s sanctioning of intimidation and harassment of Americans and their family members rose to the level of triggering a suspension of security assistance as would be required under the 1976 law known as the Arms Export Control Act.A provision in the fiscal 2022 bill would have required the State Department to report on allegations of systematic extrajudicial killings and torture by Egyptian security services and to determine whether those crimes constituted gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.A provision in the fiscal 2023 bill would have subjected the planned transfer of two surplus U.S. Navy ships to Egypt to a requirement that the president first certify Cairo wasn\u2019t engaged in activities such as arms purchases from Russia that were made sanctionable by a 2017 law.And language in the fiscal 2023 omnibus spending deal that would have excluded $130 million in military aid to Egypt without a waiver unless human rights improvements were made got whittled down to $85 million in negotiations with the Senate.The chair and ranking members of the Senate and House foreign affairs panels \u201calways have veto rights on any NDAA amendment that is considered within their purview on the Foreign Relations\/Foreign Affairs committees,\u201d Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, said in an email.Menendez\u2019 role in dropping or watering down the provisions isn\u2019t clear. Some senior Republicans in the House and Senate believe the security relationship with Egypt should take precedence over human rights and democracy concerns.\u201cI have no evidence that Menendez personally advocated against anything we passed in the House,\u201d Malinowski said by email. \u201cHe was, however, a key negotiator in conference, and if he advocated for them, we certainly never got word of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other observers were struck by the DOJ allegation that Menendez, the son of Cuban political dissidents, exposed Egyptian nationals working for the U.S. embassy in Cairo to potential exposure and retaliation by Egyptian authorities.Menendez is accused in May 2018 of sharing non-public information with Nadine, then his girlfriend,\u00a0about the number and nationalities of individuals working at the U.S. embassy. Nadine is alleged to have forwarded that information to Egyptian\u00a0American Wael Hana, a New Jersey businessman who is alleged to have conveyed it to an Egyptian government official.\u201cAlthough this information was not classified, it was deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public,\u201d states the indictment.Cairo has a\u00a0track record under Sisi of rounding up and detaining political dissidents, activists and journalists and subjecting them to harsh and\u00a0even life-endangering prison conditions.A 2012 case involving the arrest and conviction of 43 pro-democracy and human right workers, some of them Americans, sparked outrage in Washington and spurred lawmakers to start conditioning portions of military aid to Egypt on its treatment of detainees and political prisoners.Okail, then the\u00a0director of Freedom House\u2019s Egypt program, was one of the nongovernmental organization workers arrested. Then an\u00a0\u00a0Egyptian citizen, she fled the country in 2012 and was sentenced to five-years in prison in absentia. She and the other charged NGO workers were acquitted in 2018.\u00a0\u201cThe evidence presented here is pretty staggering and that piece about inquiring about the nationalities of employees and passing it along, that would seem to move it out of corruption and to straight-up espionage,\u201d said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen.\u00a0Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. \u201cFor the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be doing that boggles my mind but so much of this boggles my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n