An FBI raid. Close to half a million dollars in cash. A new Mercedes convertible. Four bars of gold.

The trial of Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, gets underway this week. He is charged with acting as an Egyptian “foreign agent”: taking bribes in exchange for greasing weapons sales to that country while chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Menendez is the only senator in US history to have faced two federal indictments. Back in 2015, he was charged with accepting nearly $1 million in gifts and donations to help a corrupt South Florida doctor wriggle out of a multimillion dollar Medicare bill and bag a lucrative port security contract in the Dominican Republic. The trial ended in a hung jury.