Menendez Lawyers Say Policy Concern, Not Bribery, Drove Actions

(Bloomberg) -- Lawyers for Senator Robert Menendez sought to show jurors that the New Jersey Democrat was motivated by a desire to improve public policy and not by corrupt intent when he intervened in a Medicare billing dispute at the heart of his bribery trial.

Menendez is accused of misusing his office to do favors for Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye doctor and political donor, in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and luxury travel perks. Prosecutors say the senator took bribes to help the doctor in several areas, including his fight with the U.S. over whether he overbilled Medicare by $8.9 million.

Washington lobbyist Alan Reider, a defense witness, recounted Tuesday how he helped Melgen contest accusations that he overbilled for Lucentis, a macular degeneration drug that costs doctors $2,000. Reider, a health care lawyer, said he argued to Menendez that Medicare policy that prevented multiple doses of Lucentis from a single bottle was confusing and contradictory. 

Reider made the case to Menendez and former Senator Tom Harkin, who testified as a prosecution witness. Reider said his briefing with Menendez in 2012 focused on the multidosing policy rather than Melgen’s dispute with the government. He said he knew of at least six doctors who fought with Medicare administrators over the dosing policy.

In the second day of defense testimony, Reider said Menendez’s grasp of the policy issues impressed him. “He clearly understood it,” Reider said in federal court in Newark, New Jersey. “I offered him a job,” he added jokingly.

Reider is a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, along with two of the attorneys representing Melgen at the trial, Kirk Ogrosky and Murad Hussain.

On cross examination, Reider acknowledged that Melgen consistently failed in appeals from the administrative level to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear Melgen’s case. He confirmed that Melgen kept the senator abreast of developments in his own Medicare dispute by forwarding memos that Reider wrote on the status of his litigation.

Melgen’s wife, Flor, also finished a second day of testimony by saying that at her daughter’s wedding, Menendez served in a role typically reserved for “people who are very loved and close.” The defense argues that the relationship between Menendez and Melgen was built on two decades of close friendship, not a corrupt co-dependence.

Flor Melgen also testified about an unexpected visit to her Florida home by Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor who was running for the U.S. Senate. She said Crist’s visit appeared to be prompted by her husband’s friendship with Menendez. Because neither man was home, Melgen said, she sent her daughter and son-in-law to buy takeout for dinner. After her husband returned home, Crist spent the night as a guest and gave her a $100 check to cover his expenses.

To contact the reporters on this story: Neil Weinberg in New York at nweinberg2@bloomberg.net, David Voreacos in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim, Paul Cox