For the third time in six months, Senator Robert Menendez stood before a judge in Manhattan on Monday to be formally arraigned on charges in an expansive federal bribery case. He pleaded not guilty, just as he had twice before.
“Once again — not guilty, your honor,” Mr. Menendez told the judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court.
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, has previously pleaded not guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for political favors and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
On Monday, he pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice, a charge added last week in an updated indictment.
His wife, Nadine Menendez, also pleaded not guilty to obstructing justice. Two New Jersey businessmen accused of bribing the couple with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, similarly reiterated their not-guilty pleas.
The appearance of the four defendants was brief and largely perfunctory, but the senator, 70, and Ms. Menendez, 57, were surrounded by news cameras as they exited the building in silence and climbed into a waiting car.
The new charges come less than two months before the scheduled start of the trial, May 6.
Judge Stein said that he intended to hold firm to the planned timeline, but he also suggested that a pretrial appeal that could lead to a monthslong delay was possible.
The obstruction of justice charges appear to be related to information provided by Jose Uribe, a former insurance broker accused in September in the bribery conspiracy. Earlier this month, Mr. Uribe admitted that he had tried to bribe the senator with a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for Mr. Menendez’s efforts to scuttle an insurance fraud investigation in New Jersey.
Mr. Uribe, 56, is now cooperating with prosecutors.
He told the judge that he and Ms. Menendez met at a hotel to get their stories straight after he received a subpoena in connection to the case. During that meeting, he said he agreed to lie to investigators — and to his own lawyer.
The car, according to prosecutors, was one of the first bribes provided for the benefit of the senator and Ms. Menendez. The Mercedes replaced a vehicle that police records show Ms. Menendez was driving in December 2018 when she struck and killed a pedestrian, Richard Koop, in Bogota, N.J.
Last week’s updated indictment accused the senator and his wife of lying to their lawyers, too, and trying to make it appear as though car payments arranged by Mr. Uribe were loans, not bribes.
“Menendez and Nadine Menendez wrote checks and letters falsely characterizing the return of bribe money,” prosecutors wrote in the fourth successive indictment, which increased the number of criminal counts to 18, up from four.
Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have said that overzealous prosecutors were criminalizing normal legislative activity and flouting protections afforded to members of Congress by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause. They have filed motions seeking to have the indictment dismissed, and the judge is expected to rule on that request soon.
If Judge Stein does not dismiss the indictment, defendants will be permitted to ask the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in on charges that might relate to the speech or debate clause, according to two lawyers involved in the case.
Short of that, however, Judge Stein indicated that he had no intention of deviating from the May 6 start date. Prosecutors have said that the case involved a voluminous amount of evidence seized in searches of the senator’s home and the defendants’ electronic devices — some of which involves sensitive information classified as secret by the government.
On Monday, a prosecutor from the Southern District of New York said that he expected the government’s case to take between four and six weeks; the defense case is likely to last for at least a week.
“The trial is coming up very quickly — I think unjustly quickly,” Lawrence S. Lustberg, Mr. Hana’s lawyer, said outside the courthouse.
He said that Mr. Hana, an Egyptian-American who founded a halal meat company that prosecutors have said was used to funnel bribes to the senator and his wife, was innocent of the charges and prepared to prove that at trial.
Mr. Menendez is in his third full term in the U.S. Senate. He has not said whether he would compete in a Democratic primary for re-election, as he had planned to do before he was indicted; the primary, on June 4, could occur in the middle of the federal trial.
At least four other Democrats, including Representative Andy Kim and New Jersey’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, are vying to run for the seat, and the filing deadline, March 25, is quickly approaching. If Mr. Menendez were to run as an independent, he would have until June 4 to file paperwork.
He has refused widespread calls for his resignation. Asked Monday if he planned to run for re-election, Mr. Menendez noted that he was standing in a courthouse.
“I don’t think announcing it in a courtroom,” he said, “would be the best idea.”
