Abbe Lowell, the defense attorney working for U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), absorbed a federal judge's decision today to throw out seven bribery counts in his client’s corruption case.

“With the court’s decision, this case is now solely about the purest of personal hospitality allegations–stays at his friend, Dr. Melgen’s family home and reimbursed trips on a plane that Dr. Melgen was flying anyway,” Lowell said in a statement. 

“A jury rejected the government’s facts and theory of bribery, and now the trial judge has rejected a critical legal theory on which the case was brought,” he added. “The decision of the DOJ to retry the case makes even less sense than it did last week and we hope it would be reconsidered.”