Former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on Thursday testified that U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, twice approached him to discuss a pending criminal matter, a type of conversation that Grewal said he had a policy of avoiding.
Menendez is on trial in the Southern District of New York after pleading not guilty to bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice and other offenses; among other allegations, he has been accused of reaching out to state and federal prosecutors to seek favorable treatment for his associates.
Grewal, who is now director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, has previously held leadership roles in both state and federal prosecutors’ offices. In all those positions, he said he made a personal policy of not speaking about pending criminal cases with anyone but his colleagues who were working on the matter.
“I believe there’s no more surefire way to lose the confidence of your staff than if you’re having conversations about their cases with the lawyers on their matters,” Grewal said.
Grewal testified that in early 2019, he received a phone call from Menendez in which the senator raised concerns about how the Office of the Insurance Fraud Prosecutor, a division of the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, “was treating Hispanic defendants as opposed to non-Hispanic defendants.”
“I said ‘Is this about a pending criminal matter?’ to which he replied ‘Yes,’ and I said ‘Are they represented?’ And he said ‘Yes,’” Grewal testified.
Grewal recalled that he asked for the name of the defense attorney, recognized the name as a respected local criminal defense attorney and advised Menendez that the lawyer could raise any concerns with the prosecutors handling the case.
“It was fairly consistent with how I handled outreach like that, whether it was a criminal defense attorney or, in this case, the senior senator,” Grewal said.
After that, Grewal testified, the conversation shifted back to small talk and ended soon after. He said he did not mention the call to the prosecutors in the insurance fraud division.
“I don’t want my teams to feel pressured or intimidated in any way,” Grewal said. “I want them to make the calls in their cases based on the facts of their cases before them, free of any influence from the outside.”
Several months later, Grewal said, Menendez invited him to an in-person meeting at the senator’s Newark office. Grewal said he did not inquire about the topic of the meeting but expected it to be “a policy issue or something that our office was working on.”
Grewal attended the meeting with one of his top deputies, Andrew Bruck, who later became acting New Jersey AG when Grewal left for the SEC. He said it was his usual practice to bring a member of his staff to meetings with members of New Jersey’s Congressional delegation because the elected officials were typically also accompanied by staffers.
Grewal said Menendez appeared to be surprised by Bruck’s presence.
“Based on my observation, I don’t think he was expecting me to have somebody with him … it was almost like an ‘Oh’ when Andrew walked in with me. He himself did not have a staffer with him,” Grewal said.
After some small talk, Grewal recalled that Menendez again raised the issue of how the Office of the Insurance Fraud Prosecutor was treating Hispanic and non-Hispanic defendants.
Grewal said he immediately asked whether this was the same matter Menendez had raised in his phone call, and when the senator said yes, he reiterated that the lawyer involved in the case could talk to the line prosecutors.
“The impression I got was that he did not like how the matter was being handled, but I didn’t get an impression, or he didn’t say anything about how the matter should be handled. The conversation never got there,” Grewal said.
Grewal said he again did not relay the conversation to prosecutors in his office and indeed was not familiar with the details of the case.
“I just wanted to move on from the conversation,” Grewal said. “It wasn’t something I was comfortable speaking to him about.”
Grewal said he would respond differently to “credible allegations” of selective prosecution, but he noted that Menendez did not offer any data or evidence in their brief conversations.
Grewal recalled that he and Bruck rode the elevator out of Menendez’s office and met a state trooper for a ride back to their own office.
“I recall, before walking into the car, looking at each other and I recall Andrew said to me ‘Whoa, that was gross,’” Grewal testified.
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