NEW YORK — On Election Day 2018, Bob Menendez won a third term in the Senate after his political career had been wounded at the start of his first corruption trial a year earlier.

That trial ended in a hung jury, and federal prosecutors dismissed the case, so voters in blue New Jersey decided to send him back to the Senate. But the day was not all happiness.

In a text message shown to jurors Monday in his latest trial, Menendez shared his emotions about breaking up with Nadine Arslanian.

“I cared for her a great deal,” he said in a message to Nadine’s sister, “but I can not get over her being with [another man] while she was with me.”

Menendez wound up marrying Nadine two years later. But his heartfelt election night text to his wife’s sister two years before was to suggest that they were not together during a period that prosecutors say they were conspiring.

Menendez’s defense attorneys called Nadine’s sister, his own sister and a forensic accountant to the stand to flesh out the alibi that they were on a break during part of the conspiracy and also to show that it wouldn’t be unusual for Menendez and Nadine to keep their own cash and gold around the house.

The senator’s defense team is trying to rebut prosecutors’ claims that the couple conspired from early 2018 through 2022 to sell his office for gold bars and stacks of cash.

But prosecutors poked holes in the defense witnesses’ accounts that may have seriously wounded the senator’s defense case.

In particular, prosecutors emphasized that the forensic accountant, who Menendez’s team has fought for weeks to call to testify, fabricated data Menendez’s legal team presented to jurors.

Likewise, they undermined a key point made by the senator’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez. She testified that she could ask her brother to help friends who needed it. That was supposed to suggest Menendez makes calls on behalf of his constituents. But prosecutors showed text messages that suggest his own sister didn’t get the kind of VIP treatment that prosecutors say the men who bribed the senator got.

When his sister’s neighbor needed help with an immigration issue, Menendez directed her to contact his office’s staff.

When the men accused of bribing the senator wanted help, according to prosecutors, the senator would take up their pet issues with the New Jersey attorney general, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey or with a senior official in the Trump administration.

Russell Richardson, a forensic accountant at the consulting firm of Guidepost Solutions, summarized years of financial records that seemed to confirm that the senator has routinely withdrawn hundreds of dollars of cash each month. Bank records indeed show Menendez regularly withdrew $400 in cash every few weeks, an amount that totaled over $150,000 since he joined the Senate.

The senator has said he stashes money to avoid government confiscation because of trauma his family had faced in Cuba. The records don’t show whether that money was the same cash found stuffed in shopping bags, boots and jackets during an FBI search of his home in summer 2022.

And prosecutors emphasized that some of the accountant’s figures were completely fabricated.

Richardson presented one chart showing that Menendez might have withdrawn similar amounts of money during his earlier time in the U.S. House. But those numbers were based on assumptions, not actual bank records. They were, in his words, “extrapolated” based on the senator’s behavior while in the Senate. But that required pulling numbers from thin air to create a chart to show jurors.

The testimony also failed to account for $10,000 stacks of cash found in a search of the Menendez home, since Richardson said he’d never seen Menendez withdraw that much at once. Some of the envelopes of cash found at Menendez’s home had the fingerprints of one of the senator’s two co-defendants, Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer. His defense attorney has said he did give the Menendezes gifts of cash and gold, but Menendez’s legal team has not acknowledged the senator received them.

Prosecutors have had witnesses stumble on the stand during the trial, now in its eighth week. For instance, their first witness, an FBI agent who led the search of Menendez’s home, had to recant testimony about where he found one of the senator’s blazers during his search.

Still, the cross-examination of the accountant stood out as particularly brutal because Menendez plans to call only five witnesses. The senator himself could also testify, though that seems very unlikely. Menendez is, of course, presumed innocent, so the burden is on prosecutors to prove their case, but a key part of his defense is that it’s plausible the stacks of cash found in his home were rightly his.

To that end, Gonzalez, his sister, testified that at one point in the 1980s, she’d known that her brother had stored cash in a boot box in his house. That, she said, was “normal” because “he’s a Cuban” and their family had fled the country. Though that exit was years before Castro came to power, and Menendez was himself born in Manhattan, she said her father told the family not to trust banks and that “forms a law inside of you.”

The other part of the Menendez defense is that his wife, Nadine, was going behind his back.

To that end, his attorneys called her sister, Katia Tabourian, to talk about their breakup.

She also talked about her own family’s heirlooms, which at one point included several kilograms of gold.

But she was unclear how much family gold her sister had beyond some coins and jewelry that are not at issue in the case.

Defense attorneys had more success trying to show that a closet where the FBI found much of the cash and all of the gold was a room Nadine primarily used and kept locked. The FBI agent who had to recant the testimony about the blazer had to do so because he’d said he found the senator’s blazer inside that closet — when clearly the blazer was hanging on a nearby door.

Menendez’s attorney Adam Fee also tried to rebut testimony that the senator had once summoned Nadine to a conspiratorial meeting by ringing a bell.

He asked Tabourian if she’d ever seen her brother-in-law summon her sister with a bell.

“I’ve never seen a bell,” Tabourian said.

Jurors were given Tuesday off because of ongoing fights between prosecutors and Menendez’s defense team over what other evidence Menendez can show jurors in coming days.

Menendez’s team wants to show evidence that Nadine was assaulted by her ex-boyfriend.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who is overseeing the case, warned the Menendez team last week that he does not want to turn the trial into a soap opera and has been frustrated by a “tsunami” of legal filings over the weekend about what to show jurors.

“You’re not only making it a soap opera, you’re making it a bad soap opera,” Stein told Menendez’s defense attorneys on Monday.