Menendez lawyers cite ‘traumatic’ history to explain his cash stockpile

When Sen. Bob Menendez was charged last year with participating in a complex bribery scheme, news headlines highlighted a peculiar detail: Investigators had discovered more than $480,000 in cash and 13 bars of gold during a June 22 search of his house in New Jersey.

Days later, the senator offered an explanation for the cash, saying he routinely withdrew large sums of money from his savings account, a custom he said he had learned from his Cuban immigrant parents.

Now, Menendez’s lawyers have gone further, asserting that the habit was rooted in deep psychological trauma tied to his father’s suicide nearly 50 years ago and a family history of confiscated property in Cuba.

They want a psychiatrist who has evaluated Menendez, 70, to testify at the senator’s federal corruption trial about what they have described as “traumatic experiences in his past associated with cash and finances.”

In a newly disclosed letter, his lawyers link the father’s death to a decision by Menendez that, according to the psychiatrist, caused him lifelong trauma — and they want a jury to hear about it.

The psychiatrist, Karen B. Rosenbaum, would be expected to testify that Menendez “experienced trauma when his father, a compulsive gambler, died by suicide after Sen. Menendez eventually decided to discontinue paying off his father’s gambling debts,” the senator’s lawyers said last month in a letter to prosecutors.

On Wednesday, the government made it clear it objected to the doctor’s proposed testimony.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York included a copy of the letter in a legal filing that asked the judge to preclude Rosenbaum from taking the witness stand. The prosecutors are challenging the scientific basis for the psychiatrist’s conclusions and suggesting the defense is trying to evoke sympathy from jurors.

The dispute comes less than two weeks before the start of Menendez’s widely anticipated trial in Manhattan, and offers yet another peek into the senator’s potential defense strategy. The lawyers had previously indicated that he was poised to blame his wife, Nadine Menendez, for at least part of the bribery scheme.

Menendez’s father’s death and his family’s history in Cuba left him with a “fear of scarcity” that led to a “long-standing coping mechanism of routinely withdrawing and storing cash in his home,” the senator’s lawyers, Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, wrote, summarizing Rosenbaum’s conclusions.