Menendez meetings with officials were about policy, not friendship, staffers say

NEWARK -- After being repeatedly mentioned in testimony over the first seven weeks of U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez's bribery trial, former staffer Michael Barnard took the stand for the first time Thursday as a defense witness to key conversations at the heart of the federal corruption case.

Barnard, who worked on health care issues for the New Jersey Democrat before taking a lobbying job with Johnson & Johnson, testified he only became aware of a Medicare billing dispute involving the senator's co-defendant, Salomon Melgen, while researching the government's "contradictory and ambiguous" reimbursement policies.

"It's a Medicare policy," Barnard said, describing what he said was Menendez's interest in Melgen's billing woes. "It affects all practicing physicians."

But when pressed on cross examination by prosecutor J.P. Cooney, Barnard said he didn't know of any doctors other than Melgen who specifically would have benefited from Menendez's intervention.

Asked about his interactions with Alan Reider, a lawyer and lobbyist for the doctor in the billing dispute, the former staffer said his job "was to take the information (Reider) was providing and come to my own conclusion."

Prosecutors have accused Menendez of using the power of his Senate office to aid Melgen in various government matters -- including the Medicare dispute and a foreign port security contract -- in exchange for lavish gifts over a number of years. Defense attorneys argue the senator's actions were rooted in his legitimate concerns about broader policy issues, and that the gifts were acts of generosity between longtime friends.

Calling Melgen the senator's "closest friend," Jodi Herman, Menendez's former foreign policy adviser, said Melgen's dispute with the government of the Dominican Republic over a port security contract he owned was not the focus of a 2012 meeting with a State Department official.

Herman testified the senator's two meetings with Ambassador Bill Brownfield, the assistant secretary overseeing the State Department's counter-narcotics programs, in September 2011 and May 2012 were focused, among other issues, on the flow of drugs from the Dominican Republic to the United States, rather than a specific case affecting Melgen.

Over the objections of prosecutors, defense attorney Jenny Kramer also elicited testimony from Herman that at least one other company with U.S. investors was engaged in a similar contract dispute with the Dominican government. That company, Codacsa, which had been contracted to build a toll road in the country, also came up during the meeting, Herman said.

In objecting to that line of questioning, prosecutor Amanda Vaughn argued there was no relationship between the two companies. "Were they also bribing Senator Menendez?" she asked outside the jury's presence, drawing groans from the senator's supporters in the courtroom. U.S. District Judge William Walls ultimately allowed jurors to hear the testimony.

Jurors did not hear, as The Star-Ledger reported in 2013, that Codacsa's lone investor was a New Jersey company operated by a Menendez donor.

Elio Muller, a former Commerce Department official who Melgen hired as a consultant for his port security contract dispute, acknowledged he referred to the doctor in an email to Brownfield as a potential "bull in the Commerce china cabinet" because of his connections.

But Muller, who has known both men for more than 20 years, said he didn't intend for that description or his reference to Melgen having political connections to serve as threats to resolve the dispute in the doctor's favor -- just that the issue was not "going away by itself."

The trial is expected to resume Monday.

Thomas Moriarty may be reached by email at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.comFollow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty.

MaryAnn Spoto may be reached at mspoto@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryAnnSpoto. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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