‘Is There Any Chance He Can Sit on a Camel?’ A Senator’s Wife Wanted to Know.

In March 2019, an aide to Senator Robert Menendez drafted a letter that used strong language to criticize the president of Egypt and the country’s human rights record. Mr. Menendez declined to sign it.

Mr. Menendez, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he wanted to try a less confrontational approach, the aide, Sarah Arkin, testified on Monday at the senator’s bribery trial.

“We’ve been going after them for so long on human rights — have been really out there publicly criticizing them — and it hasn’t really changed anything on the ground,” Ms. Arkin, a senior staff member with the committee, said Mr. Menendez had told her.

Instead, Mr. Menendez said he wanted “to be a little less publicly critical and do more private and quiet engagement,” Ms. Arkin said.

Ms. Arkin’s testimony came at the start of the seventh week of the senator’s trial in Manhattan federal court. Mr. Menendez, 70, is charged with steering aid and weapons to Egypt in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes as part of a wide-ranging and yearslong conspiracy.

He has strenuously maintained his innocence, and as Mr. Menendez was leaving court on Monday he defended his record related to Egypt and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. “No one has been a harsher critic of Egypt,” Mr. Menendez said. “No one has been more persistent a critic of President el-Sisi on the question of human rights, democracy, rule of law.”