Jurors who convicted former Sen. Bob Menendez of selling his political power for gold bars and other riches last year saw a puzzling patchwork of black bars on evidence presented to them in court, hiding details the judge deemed prejudicial or otherwise objectionable.

But when they began deliberating, the black bars disappeared on at least a dozen exhibits prosecutors loaded onto a laptop jurors could consult, exposing material that federal Judge Sidney H. Stein had ordered redacted.

So what did they see, and why does it matter?

Most of the exhibits in question contained details that defense attorneys successfully argued jurors shouldn’t see because they pertained to legislative actions Menendez took — and members of Congress cannot be arrested, sued, or otherwise held liable for their official actions under the U.S. Constitution’s speech or debate clause.

Prosecutors first revealed the problem in November, when they admitted they accidentally uploaded nine insufficiently redacted exhibits to the jury laptop — but had wiped it clean since the trial, making it impossible to tell if jurors had seen the exhibits in question. Since then, both prosecutors and defense attorneys have discovered a handful more. Defense attorneys demanded a new trial over the issue, which court observers say could torpedo the jury’s guilty-on-all-counts verdicts. Stein has yet to rule on the matter.

Prosecutors have repeatedly downplayed their goofs, arguing that jurors likely didn’t see the problematic few exhibits — amid more than 3,000 loaded on the laptop — during the roughly 13 hours they deliberated over three days in July.

Many of the improperly redacted exhibits reveal details prosecutors had deemed “very critical evidence” in their bid to show Menendez — who at the time chaired the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee — accepted bribes in exchange for approving military aid to Egypt.

One involves a January 2022 text exchange between Menendez and his wife, Nadine, in which the ex-senator sent her a CNN article about $2.5 billion in U.S. arms sales to Egypt. Nadine Menendez responded “WOW” and then forwarded the link to Wael Hana, the businessman who gave the couple cash, gold, and other gifts in exchange for helping him retain a lucrative monopoly on halal meat exports to Egypt, with the message: “Bob had to sign off on this.”

Stein had ordered the CNN link and “Bob had to sign off on this” message redacted, meaning jurors would have only seen Nadine Menendez reacting “WOW” to some unknown text obscured by a black bar. Instead, prosecutors uploaded the unredacted exchange and included the link, which contained the verbiage “us-arms-sales-egypt,” to the jurors’ laptops.

“While the government now tries to downplay this evidence as ‘of secondary relevance’ and ‘meaningless,’ the Unredacted Exhibits are the only evidence specifically tying Senator Menendez to an actual, consummated provision of military aid to Egypt,” Menendez’s lawyers wrote in a brief asking for a new trial.

In another text exchange, an Egyptian government official in September 2019 texted Hana: “Director office of Egyptian affairs in state department . . . told our DCM today that senator Menendize [sic] put an hold on a billion $ of usaid to Egypt before the recess !!!!”

Stein ordered that entire text message redacted. But prosecutors instead uploaded the message to jurors’ laptop with just Menendez’s misspelled name and “an hold” redacted.

“Any rational juror would readily conclude that behind the black redaction bar is Senator Menendez’s name and/or some reference to an action taken with respect to ‘a billion $ of usaid to Egypt,’” defense attorneys Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman wrote. “As a consequence, the jury was exposed to evidence of the government’s precluded theory that Senator Menendez took specific actions with respect to billions of dollars of military aid to Egypt in exchange for bribes.”

Stein also had ordered redactions on several text messages written in Arabic, but those made it to jurors’ laptop.

And he told prosecutors to redact part of a text between a Qatari national and real estate developer Fred Daibes, who gave the Menendezes gold bars and cash so the ex-senator would help him secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a Qatari royal. In that text, Daibes mentioned a car he owned he called “the Hitler car,” because of its connection to the Nazi dictator. Stein ordered the word “Hitler” to be blacked out, but defense attorneys discovered it was unredacted in the exhibits uploaded to jurors’ laptop.

“Of course, any reference by a defendant to ‘Hitler’ in evidence provided to a jury in a criminal trial is highly prejudicial,” Fee and Weitzman wrote.

Last month, prosecutors divulged additional failures in redactions on long message chains between Hana and Ahmed Helmy, an Egyptian spy; Hana and Daibes; and Hana and Nadine Menendez, who prosecutors say brokered the bribes between the ex-senator and Hana, Daibes, and co-defendant Jose Uribe.

Menendez’s attorneys said prosecutors had no direct evidence showing Menendez forged a corrupt agreement with Egypt — and couldn’t try to prove an agreement indirectly by introducing evidence of his military aid approvals since the speech and debate clause protects such legislative acts. The unredacted exhibits, consequently, filled a “major gap” in their case, they added.

“If the government is going to charge a sitting senator with engaging in a multi-year bribery scheme with a foreign nation, a rational jury would expect that there would be something to show for it,” Fee and Weitzman wrote. “But absent the Unredacted Exhibits, the government had all of nothing — precisely why it panicked when this Court excluded them in the first place.”

Most of the exhibits in question weren’t mentioned during opening or closing arguments or in trial testimony, and so would have confused — and been disregarded by — jurors, prosecutors have argued.

“The pertinent matter, in each case, appears deep in lengthy exhibits — on page 10 of a 51-page exhibit, page 66 of a 127-page exhibit, pages 72 and 166 of a 252-page exhibit, and pages 547-48 and 561-62 of a 636-page exhibit,” prosecutors wrote in a Dec. 16 letter about the unredacted message chains. “The plain reality is that the jurors obviously did not dive deeply into these unmentioned, scarcely-cited or wholly uncited documents and observe any of the excluded matter.”

But prosecutors’ mounting confessions of wrongly admitted evidence demonstrate “a pervasive pattern of constitutionally monumental mistakes” that proves Menendez’s conviction cannot stand, Menendez’s attorney argued.

“It is simply no longer tenable to defend the verdicts,” Fee and Weitzman wrote. “This episode has crossed the line from tragedy to farce. And our justice system cannot afford to become a farce. The Court must order a new trial.”

Stein last month rejected defense attorneys’ initial bid to toss the convictions — filed before prosecutors revealed their evidence error — saying the guilty verdicts were based on extensive witness testimony and evidence and were not unjust.

Last week, the judge also rejected requests by Menendez and his co-defendants to postpone their Jan. 29 sentencing. Nadine Menendez’s trial, which Stein had postponed to accommodate her cancer treatment, is set to start Feb. 5.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

Twelve days after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, police arrested Riley June Williams for several federal crimes.

It wasn’t hard to identify her — cameras clearly caught the young Harrisburg woman in the rampaging throngs, and she outed herself on social media as the thief of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop.

But Williams tried to dodge accountability by publicly trashing the ex-boyfriend who tipped investigators to her identity — and for that, a New Jersey judge this week ordered her to pay ex-beau Michael Prodanov $50,000 in damages for defamation.

Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Hurd also ordered Williams’ friend Cyrus Sanders, who repeated her claims on Facebook, to pay $50,000 in damages for defamation, too. Neither Williams nor Sanders responded to Prodanov’s defamation lawsuit, and Hurd filed his default judgment on Monday.

Lori Ulrich is the federal public defender who represented Williams in her Capitol case. Ulrich told the New Jersey Monitor Friday that she found Hurd’s judgment “very troubling,” given that Williams had no attorney in the defamation case and could not defend herself. Williams was sentenced in March to three years in federal prison for six crimes.

“They exploited that fact that she was not represented and the fact that she’s in prison,” Ulrich said. “She was not able to defend herself in that.”

Federal prosecutors had accused Williams of trying to evade capture by fleeing her home, deleting her social media accounts, and changing her phone number after the riot.

But she said she did so to hide from Prodanov, telling authorities he was an abusive stalker against whom she’d secured a temporary order of protection from abuse. Sanders also misidentified Prodanov as Russian, suggesting he was a spy, according to Prodanov’s lawsuit. He is an American-born citizen of Bulgarian ethnicity, the complaint says.

Several media outlets, including the Britain-based Daily Mail and far-right international newspaper The Epoch Times, published Williams’ and Sanders’ claims.

But Prodanov’s attorney, Christopher J. D’Alessandro, called those claims “false” and said Williams sought the protective order only after she learned authorities were seeking her.

She lied to “deflect liability … under the pretext of victimhood” and “exact vengeance” on her ex after he alerted authorities to Williams’ identity and informed them she planned to give Pelosi’s laptop to a Russian citizen, D’Alessandro said.

“He fulfilled his duties as a responsible citizen, and he paid the price of getting a (protection order) filed against him, which was then utilized to justify someone’s flight from the FBI,” he said.

Ulrich denied that Williams lied about her relationship with Prodanov, saying: “we disagree with that.”

Prodanov, a Rutgers University student, feels vindicated by the verdict but disappointed the false claims remain findable online, D’Alessandro added.

“He’s a young man who’s in college and he’s got a whole life ahead of him, but now he has to live with this burden of having these comments out there for the rest of his life,” he said.