NJ Sen. Bob Menendez goes on trial Monday. He may blame his wife for alleged bribes.

Indicted Sen. Bob Menendez's trial begins on Monday in Manhattan and officials from Washington to Hudson County, New Jersey will be eagerly watching for the fallout.

Menendez and his wife Nadine were indicted last September in a sprawling case that accuses them of doing favors for two foreign governments and three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for gold bars, stacks of cash and a Mercedes-Benz found at the couple’s home. The senator is charged with 17 counts of bribery, corruption, conspiracy, wire fraud, acting as a foreign agent without registering with the U.S. Justice Department and obstruction of justice. His wife faces many of the same counts.

Judge Sidney Stein allowed the couple to split their cases into two separate trials at Nadine Menendez’s request, due to health issues she is facing. The senator and two businessmen also accused in the scheme, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, will be tried together, with jury selection set to start on Monday. Nadine Menendez will be tried after that trial is completed.

A third businessman in the case, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion in March, and is expected to provide testimony.

Court papers and legal analysts suggest the senator may try to shift guilt onto Nadine Menendez.

“I do anticipate that Senator Menendez will blame his wife for misleading him or failing to fill him in on many of the details of this scheme,” said Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “And I think the fact that she's now been severed and will have her own separate trial at a later date really facilitates that defense.”

The strategy was first revealed in mid-April after news outlets pressed for sealed documents in the case to be opened.

Prosecutors say Nadine Menendez typically served as the point of contact for the businessmen involved in their schemes. They allege that in 2018 she introduced the senator, who was her new boyfriend at the time, to Hana, an Egyptian-born businessman in New Jersey. Hana then introduced Bob Menendez to Egyptian military and intelligence officials who wanted to ease a hold placed by the United States on military sales to their country over human rights concerns, according to the indictment.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the senator advocated for the weapon sales, according to the complaint. Prosecutors say he also helped Hana establish a monopoly over halal meat certification for all Egyptian exports. Money gained from that monopoly was used to bribe the Menendezes, prosecutors say.

But Cardozo's Roth said extensive text conversations between the couple that prosecutors have cited as evidence could complicate any effort by the senator's defense team to throw Nadine Menendez under the legal bus.

“There are numerous references in the indictment to encrypted messages among the alleged co-conspirators," Roth said. "So we have all these text messages and other forms of messages that I assume the prosecutors are intending to introduce into evidence, which look very incriminating on their face. And the fact that many of them were encrypted suggests that there was some sense of culpability on the part of the participants that they were trying to keep these messages hidden.”

Daibes also knew Bob Menendez and donated to the senator’s campaigns, according to prosecutors. They allege that Menendez helped Daibes, who was born in Beirut, obtain financing from a member of the royal family of Qatar for a real estate project in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Most of the attorneys in the case have declined to speak publicly. But César de Castro, the lawyer for Fred Daibes — who is accused of conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, wire fraud and obstruction of justice — said the evidence will show his client is not guilty.

“We expect that the government will juxtapose facts in an unfair way to give the appearance that something untoward or inappropriate was occurring,” de Castro said. “We believe that when the jury looks past appearances and sees the evidence for what it truly is, it will see that there were no crimes committed.”

The U.S. Supreme Court made it harder to convict elected officials of bribery in its 2016 decision in McDonnell v. United States, which set a higher standard for proving that someone accused of bribery had acted in their official capacity and had received a payment for that specific act.

In the Menendez case, the indictment lays out several specific “official acts” that prosecutors say the senator took. They allege Bob Menendez used his position leading the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to paper over human rights violations in Egypt that were raised by other congressional members. The U.S. Attorney's office said the senator sought to release a hold on arms sales to Egypt; to assist that country with a dispute with Ethiopia and Sudan over a dam on the Nile River; and to obtain a list of employees at the American embassy in Cairo that is described as sensitive but not classified information.

They also allege Bob Menendez attempted to influence senior prosecutors at both the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark and the New Jersey state attorney general's office, around cases that involved Daibes and Uribe.

The Menendezes are also charged with obstruction of justice related to checks that prosecutors say the senator made out to Daibes and Hana after becoming aware of the investigation. Bob Menendez has claimed the checks were meant to repay loans from the two men, but prosecutors allege they were actually bribes.

Bob Menendez has rarely spoken publicly about the case except to say he is innocent of all the charges. Court papers suggest his attorneys will seek to argue that the money found in his home was a response to growing up with parents who were Cuban refugees and did not trust banks to hold their money.

Menendez is not running for re-election in New Jersey's June Democratic primary. He has said that if he is exonerated, he might run as an "independent Democrat" in November.

He was tried by federal prosecutors in 2017 on bribery and corruption charges that accused him of accepting gifts, lavish vacations and campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor in exchange for intervening on his behalf with a federal fraud investigation. That trial ended in a hung jury.

In the current case, Menendez might make a similar argument to the one he made in 2017, according to Cardozo's Roth. “I expect he will say that the payments that he was aware of, he understood to be gifts unrelated to any official action,” she said.

Since the case is happening in New York rather than New Jersey, the court is unlikely to have much trouble forming a jury of people who know little or nothing about the case. The list of proposed questions filed with the court include several asking if a potential juror has any opinions about Menendez, or about politics in New Jersey.

Among those questions: “Do you think that because they are from New Jersey, they are more likely to break the law?”