Former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez may spend more than a decade in jail when he is sentenced Wednesday for accepting cash, a Mercedes Benz, and gold bars as bribes in exchange for assisting three New Jersey businessmen and the Egyptian government.
After a nine-week trial, Menendez was found guilty of 16 criminal charges in connection with the long-running corruption plot. He was the first US senator to be accused and convicted for serving as a foreign government agent. Dozens of witnesses testified, including one of the businesspeople involved in the plan.
His imprisonment is a stunning setback for the politician, who was born to Cuban immigrants and began his political career in Union City, New Jersey. Menendez defeated one federal bribery accusation in 2018 and rose to the post of head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he vacated in 2023 after being indicted in the current bribery conspiracy.
Prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan have asked Judge Sidney Stein to sentence the former New Jersey senator to “at least 15 years” in prison and order him to pay millions of dollars in forfeiture and fines “to provide just punishment for this extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of public trust.”
“Menendez’s conduct may be the most serious for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic,” the prosecutor wrote. The US Probation Office proposes a 12-year sentence.
The 71-year-old senator, who has insisted on his innocence, has received over 100 letters of support, including from the former president of Cyprus, local New Jersey lawmakers, religious figures, and voters. His lawyers are seeking for no prison time and at least two years of “rigorous community service.”
“We respectfully submit that, notwithstanding his conviction, Bob is deserving of mercy because of the penalties already imposed, his age, and the lack of a compelling need to impose a custodial sentence,” the judge’s attorneys wrote to him. “Until this conviction marred his reputation, his career and life has been celebrated mainly for his work on behalf of the powerless and downtrodden,” according to the statement.
His attorneys requested the judge to get Menendez out of prison while he appealed his conviction.
During the trial, the jury heard testimony that during a search of the senator’s house, FBI agents discovered gold bars and envelopes loaded with cash, some inside shoes and in a jacket pocket carrying the senator’s name.
In exchange, prosecutors claimed Menendez lobbied the US Department of Agriculture for a monopoly on halal meat certification that benefitted one of the companies, campaigned for military aid to Egypt, and “modulated his criticism” of the country’s human rights violations. He also sought to meddle with two criminal investigations involving the other two businesses.
The former senator’s criminal trial was not his first. He was originally charged on corruption charges in 2015 for allegedly receiving bribes from a rich ophthalmologist in exchange for political favors. Following a mistrial in 2017, Menendez was acquitted on several charges in 2018 with the Department of Justice dropping those that remained.
The longstanding politician was accused in September 2023, along with his wife Nadine, but their trials were halted as she was stricken with cancer and underwent treatment. Nadine Menendez has pled not guilty and is set to go on trial in March.