Embattled Sen. Bob Menendez is facing a new perfect storm of legal and political troubles — splitting from the super-lawyer defending him against charges of bribery, facing speculation that one of his co-accused’s closest associates could be ratting him out to federal prosecutors, and seeing his polls plummet.
The New Jersey Democrat quietly split from his longtime powerhouse lawyer Abbe Lowell — who secured his acquittal from previous bribery charges — and instead signed up with Washington-based attorney Robert Luskin.
Ironically for an indictee fighting charges he took bribes in gold bars, Luskin was himself once paid in gold bars by another client — earning the nickname “Gold Bar Bob,” the same as the senator’s.
Menendez, 69, who has been in the political arena for half a century and a member of the US Senate since 2006, is now facing record low poll numbers with 70 percent of Garden State voters saying he should resign.
The Democrat’s latest troubles began in June 2022, when federal agents raided his Englewood Cliffs, NJ home and found gold bars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed into the pockets of Menendez’s jackets.
Menendez, his second wife Nadine Arslanian, and three associates — one of them a developer called Fred Daibes — were indicted in October on charges of bribery and conspiring to act as foreign agents for Egypt. All five deny all charges.
Now The Post can disclose that one of Daibes’ former business partners, who was also a Menendez donor, has been co-operating with Manhattan prosecutors since Feb. 2022, four months before the raid.
Gazmend Lita, an Albanian-American quietly cut a plea deal that month, agreeing to co-operate with the prosecutors on undisclosed investigations while pleading guilty to one count of being part of an illegal gambling ring, according to court documents.
In return he got 3 years probation and agreed to forfeit more than $111,000 for his crimes, according to federal court records — compared to the 5-year sentence he could have faced.
But Lita — who once posed with Pres. Joe Biden long before his time in the White House — is closely entwined with Daibes, who in turn is accused of bribing Menendez.
The 53-year-old Albanian-American co-owned Le Jardin restaurant in Edgewater with Daibes, while his Lita Bros. Construction has offices in the same Edgewater corporate building that houses Daibes’s own construction firm.
He also lives in an apartment at the luxury river-front residential tower, The Alexander, developed by Daibes.
And Lita is also a member of the board of the Indian branch of IS EG Halal, a halal certification company at the center of the Menendez indictment.
The New Jersey-based firm is run by Egyptian-American Wael Hana, who is also indicted in the Menendez bribery case. He too denies all charges.
Prosecutors allege that Hana was introduced by Arslanian to Menendez in 2020, before the couple married.
Wael’s company, which is also run out of Daibes’ Edgewater office building, was operated with financial backing from Daibes, according to court records.
Lita has his own ties to Menendez. He and his family members have $11,000 donated to Menendez’s campaigns for Senate.
And Lita lobbied the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2019 — when Menendez was the ranking Democratic member — on behalf of an Albanian prosecutor who had been banned from entering the US, according to Open Secrets.
A New Jersey attorney for Lita did not return The Post’s request for comment Thursday.
For his part, Menendez has close ties to the Albanian-American community, with one newspaper pronouncing him “The Voice of American Reason and Justice” for his commitment to urging Serbia to recognize the independence of Kosovo, its former southern province which has an Albanian ethnic majority.
Menendez and Arslanian attended events sponsored by the Albanian American Civic League which has lobbied Menendez when he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He stepped down after the first federal indictment accusing him of bribery in September.
However he has rebuffed demands from his Democratic Senate colleagues and some of New Jersey’s most powerful party members, including Gov. Phil Murphy, to resign entirely. Murphy’s wife, Tammy, has announced she will run against Menendez in the 2024 Democratic primary for his seat.
In October, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 80 percent of Republicans favor the senator stepping down, along with 71 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of independent voters. Only 16 percent said he should remain in office. Menendez has said he will not resign.
He is now facing a political and legal fight without Lowell, the bare-knuckled brawler Washington power-lawyer who also represents Hunter Biden, by his side.
On Nov. 16, two lawyers working for the Chicago-based law firm that includes Lowell withdrew from Menendez’s case, court documents say.
No explanation was given for Lowell’s withdrawal. Lowell did not return The Post’s request for comment this week, and Luskin refused comment Wednesday.
But Lowell had guided Menendez’s defense when he stood trial in Newark federal court in 2017 on charges of conspiracy, bribery, honest services fraud and false statements over alleged payments from a Medicare fraudster. That ended with a hung jury and prosecutors chose not retry him.
Now Luskin will represent him when he appears next in federal court in Manhattan. His wife has her own legal team.
Luskin, 73, was himself once paid in 45 gold bars by a precious metals dealer who was convicted of laundering money for Colombian drug cartels.
The Harvard graduate earned the moniker “Gold Bar Bob” after accepting a $500,000 legal payment while appealing the 1993 conviction of Stephen Saccoccia, a Rhode Island precious metals dealer who laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s.
Saccoccia was slapped with a 660-year prison sentence, while in 1998 Luskin agreed to forfeit $245,000 in his fees to settle a case brought by federal prosecutors against him.
“While I settled with the government, with absolutely no admission of liability or wrongdoing, my colleagues fought the government efforts and the U.S. Court of Appeals twice ruled that the government was not entitled to forfeit these assets,” Luskin told The Post last week.
Luskin, who owns homes in Washington DC and Martha’s Vineyards, also represented Lance Armstrong in the disgraced cyclist’s doping case as well as a host of White House insiders of both parties.
They include Pres. George W. Bush’s polling guru Karl Rove, and Mark Middleton, a former aide to Pres. Bill Clinton with ties to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Middleton committed suicide at his home in Arkansas last year
In addition to Luskin, Menendez will also be represented by Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, who represented then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in an independent investigation of the Bridgegate affair.
The 2013-14 political scandal saw political appointees of Chris Christie conspire to create traffic jams in Fort Lee, NJ by shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge.