US senator Bob Mendez was in court today for the seventh week and what could be the first full week of testimony since his trial began menendez's defense team took Center Stage today trying to poke holes in the prosecution's meticulous timeline of texts calls and meetings laid out last week those details finally connecting those Infamous gold bars to actions taken by the senator on behalf of his friend and codefendant Fred Davies but the defense today argued it was actually naen Menendez who received the gifts and was the key point of contact for Dees on the stand today were two key Witnesses FBI special agent Paul Van W and a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Sarah Arin senior correspondent Brenda Flanigan was in the courtroom once again and has more details to share hi Brenda how did you see the defense really try to explain away the prosecution's timeline hey Joanna well you know how the prosecution has talked about the search for the price of gold bars that senator Menendez would allegedly do that when he would receive an alleged bribe well today the defense hit back and what they did was ask how can you be sure that this was Bob Menendez holding the phone doing the search and the way they tried to prove it could have been anybody was that they said look at all of these other searches here's one for blow dry hair salons in Washington DC and then they pointed at their client who was sitting in the courtroom and they said Senator Mendez doesn't look like a blow dry kind of guy right and that got a very big laugh in the courtroom but obviously the implication is that it was naen Menendez perhaps that was holding that phone making that search and we know that the defense has made it a point to blame naen to put the the the onus of this on naen that she was the one responsible for this quote unquote scheme she's going to be tried later on uh because she's being treated for breast cancer now the government also said that um this is this is this timeline that they've laid out all of the circumstantial evidence the defense said nah what you did was cherry pick and they talked about a couple of issues one of them the code word the alleged code word for gold bar was glazed donut they got another big laugh when they said if that's your code for uh gold bar it's it's really dumb and they also talked about this search that Menendez uh naden Menendez was doing for expensive homes they called it her Zillow Escapist fantasy saying that this was something that she was doing not Menendez the defense however I mean the prosecution however was able to show that Menendez did go along and look at a couple of houses with naate Dean Joanna okay so Brenda we know that later in the afternoon Sarah Arin a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer took the stand what did the prosecution get out of her today well um they essentially had her testifying about what she did in that office and what she did was she set up meetings she would do background checks on foreign officials that the senator would meet with and she was really startled to discover that he was taking meetings that they didn't know about the staff didn't know about they talked about one meeting in Egypt where she sent email to a fellow staffer saying what's this meeting they had never heard about it and she said that this was very unusual that this was the only time really that she had ever encountered something like that Joanna okay so also unusual today Brenda was uh the judge's kind of reproach to the defense what did you hear from the judge pretty infuriated today uh he was very upset a couple of times the first time was when he admonished the defense for objecting to Atkins testimony on grounds of speech and debate now that Clause essentially exempts official acts votes um resolutions specific legislative acts from being used as testimony in a criminal trial the judge said look Arin can testify about General meetings and and things that happen without talking about a specific legislative act and he says to the defense and you knew that that it's just an attempt to to slow down and sandbag the prosecution on this trial he also slammed the defense for failing to submit a list of witnesses a hard W list of witnesses for their upcoming um Pro uh presentation to the jury without any profits that is not talking about the kind of testimony they're going to give and he said that he has had it with his gamesmanship and that he doesn't want to see the government sandbagged and he wants them to do better Joanna all right great recap today from the courtroom Brenda Flanigan senior correspondent thank you as always