Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey told associates on Tuesday that he plans to resign from Congress in late August, bowing to intense pressure from Democratic colleagues who had urged him to step down or risk a forced expulsion from the Senate after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 16 federal crimes.
Mr. Menendez’s decision to quit months before the end of his third term, even as he prepared to appeal the verdict, allows Democrats to avoid a potentially ugly intraparty feud at a highly fraught political moment. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, is expected to quickly appoint a replacement who would serve until Jan. 1.
The decision was described by two people familiar with his remarks who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Mr. Menendez’s resignation marks the end of a three-decade career in Washington. It began when he was elected to the House in 1992 as a 38-year-old state lawmaker and saw him rise to become one of the most important voices on foreign policy as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Though many called for Mr. Menendez’s resignation after his indictment last fall, demands that he step aside intensified quickly after a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of taking bribes and acting as an agent of Egypt, the calls for his resignation intensified.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said for the first time that Mr. Menendez should “do what is right for his constituents, the Senate and our country” and resign; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mr. Menendez’s political protégé, said he would lead the effort to oust his longtime ally if he did not resign voluntarily.
The political landscape is far different now than it was in September, when Mr. Menendez; his wife, Nadine Menendez; and three New Jersey businessmen were first charged with taking part in a vast, yearslong bribery conspiracy.
Democrats are scrambling to maintain their narrow majority in the Senate, and the presidential race has been thrown into disarray by President Biden’s decision to bow out of his race for re-election under pressure from some in his own party who worried he could not beat former President Donald J. Trump.
Like Mr. Menendez, Mr. Trump was recently convicted of a raft of crimes in a Manhattan courtroom. But Mr. Biden’s poor performance in a debate in June and an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump have fueled the energy on the right and created a deep sense of unease for Democrats.
Mr. Menendez’s continued presence in Washington would have been a distraction for a party now trying to refocus all its energy on retaining the White House and Senate.
Representative Andy Kim won the Democratic nomination to run for Senate last month after a bruising contest with Tammy Murphy, the wife of the governor.
Polls suggest there is no path for Mr. Menendez to actually win, but some in the party fear he might have enough of a nostalgic following, particularly among Latino voters, to siphon off Democratic votes and create an opening for the Republican nominee, Curtis Bashaw.
Even a modest level of support for Mr. Menendez “could be consequential,” according to Mike DuHaime, a Republican political consultant advising Mr. Bashaw.
“The D.C. folks are definitely paying attention,” he said.
Mr. Menendez faces decades in prison when Judge Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court sentences him on Oct. 29.
Still, there is nothing in the Constitution or the Senate rules that required Mr. Menendez to give up a seat upon conviction. And a forced expulsion would have thrust the Senate into largely uncharted territory with a famously pugnacious lawmaker.
Mr. Menendez rose to prominence in Hudson County, N.J., a rough-and-tumble political proving ground where he became known as a battle-tested survivor. He went from the school board in Union City to its City Hall, serving as mayor of the 69,000-resident community where he raised his two children while also in the State Legislature.
Mr. Menendez faced a criminal investigation soon after entering the Senate in 2006, and in 2017 he avoided a conviction on federal bribery charges after a lengthy trial in New Jersey. Soon after, he was reappointed to an influential role leading the Foreign Relations Committee — where, prosecutors say, he quickly began selling the power of his office for bribes of gold and cash.
Mr. Murphy is expected to quickly tap a temporary successor to Mr. Menendez. According to several current and former aides, the governor’s shortlist includes his wife, who dropped out of the Senate race before the June primary.
Many of Mr. Menendez’s former aides and longtime friends expressed melancholy at the ignominious end to an often-distinguished career and the specter of what could amount to a lifetime sentence.
One noted ruefully that his sentencing date coincided with the 12th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy and the disaster recovery Mr. Menendez helped to lead. Another cited his unwavering, decades-long support on behalf of New Jersey’s large and varied immigrant communities.
Tasos D. Zambas, a close friend of Mr. Menendez who attended parts of the two-month trial, said the man prosecutors described in court was unrecognizable.
“Agent of a foreign government? You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Mr. Zambas, who grew up in Union City after fleeing Cyprus as a child in 1975. “He’s an amazing individual. This is not who he is.”
But the weekend after the jury’s verdict, more than two-dozen of the senator’s onetime political foes gathered in Lavallette, on the Jersey Shore, for what an organizer described as a “Menendez conviction party.” Guests wore T-shirts depicting hands gripping a jail cell above the words “BYE BYE BOBBY.”
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