A judge sentenced an emotional former Sen. Bob Menendez Wednesday to 11 years in prison Wednesday for a years-long bribery and corruption scheme that saw him rewarded with gold bars and stacks of cash.
Menendez had pleaded with U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for mercy, twice breaking down in tears.
“I have lost everything,” Menendez said, after recounting actions he said he had taken to help others while in the Senate, a job he was forced to resign after his conviction.
“For a man who spent his entire life in public service, every day I am awake is a punishment,” Menendez said.
Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of 15 years for the New Jersey Democrat, which his attorneys called “vindictive and cruel” and “a life and death sentence” for the 71-year-old former chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Menendez was found guilty in July of extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent after a sensational trial in which prosecutors charged that he accepted bribes — including cash and gold bars — to benefit the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Two co-defendants were found guilty as well and were each sentenced Wednesday to several years in prison.
Menendez pleaded not guilty and has vowed to appeal the conviction. He has also been seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump after he was unable to get one from his former Senate colleague, former President Joe Biden, NBC News has reported.
Menendez’ attorneys have pleaded with U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein to spare him jail time, noting he resigned from the Senate in August and contending he’s been punished enough.
“Senator Menendez has suffered extreme public shame and upheaval, and his finances and reputation are destroyed, likely for the rest of his life. He is the butt of late-night talk show jokes, and his name will live in infamy as the first politician in history to be convicted of being a foreign agent,” they argued in a court filing.
“He will live the rest of his days a social and political pariah, whether inside or outside of jail,” they added.
Menendez’s lawyers also contended that the judge should show mercy because of his “lifetime of good deeds,” including the work he’s done in the Senate, and that there was no evidence that “any of the acts alleged by the government harmed anyone.”
Prosecutors argue a lengthy prison sentence is a necessity given his position of power and the brazenness of the scheme.
“Menendez’s conduct may be the most serious for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic. Very few Senators have even been convicted of any criminal offense, and of those, most of the Senators engaging in bribery accepted amounts that are a fraction of what Menendez reaped,” their sentencing memo said.
“Serving in the Senate should have been its own reward. If Menendez was not corrupt, it would have been. It is not something Menendez needs to be rewarded for at all,” they added.
Menendez, his wife, Nadine, and three New Jersey businessmen were indicted in the scheme in 2023 following a lengthy investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.
Prosecutors said the businessmen paid bribes to Menendez and his wife in exchange for the senator taking actions to benefit them and the governments of Qatar and Egypt. According to prosecutors, those bribes included gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz given to Nadine Menendez and more than $480,000 in cash, which the FBI found stuffed into closets, jackets bearing Menendez’s name and other clothing when the bureau searched his New Jersey home in 2022.
Two of those businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, were tried trial alongside Menendez and convicted on all counts. They were sentenced Wednesday as well.
Daibes was the first to go before the judge, and Stein sentenced him to 84 months — about two years less than what the government was seeking. He was also fined $1.75 million for what the judge called his “very serious crimes.”
Stein gave Hana a sentence of 97 months — also about two years less than prosecutors sought — and was fined $1.25 million for the judge said was “substantial” evidence that the businessman, who he noted had assets worth more than $30 million, “committed bribery.”
The third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution during the nine-week trial. He’ll be sentenced later this year.
Nadine Menendez’s trial was pushed back to March to allow her time to undergo cancer treatments.
The senator did not testify in his own defense. His team argued that he was acting on behalf of his constituents and that the government hadn’t proven that the cash or gold bars were given as bribes.
His attorneys argued in a court filing Tuesday that the judge should stay the execution of the sentence to give him time to appeal the conviction. The motion said that among the grounds for an appeal are questions over whether some of his actions were protected by the speech and debate clause of the U.S. Constitution, which provides immunity protections to members of Congress for acts relating to their legislative work.
The filing said keeping Menendez out of jail pending his appeal would also allow him to support “his wife during her pre-operative and post-operative care, during which she will need considerable help and have no other family member available.”
It added “there is no risk that Senator Menendez will commit further crimes, and he intends to vindicate himself and restore his reputation on appeal.”
The case was the second corruption trial Menendez had faced in his 18-year career in the Senate. The previous one ended in a hung jury in 2017, and the Justice Department subsequently dropped the charges against him.
Menendez had also denied wrongdoing in that case. A Senate Ethics Committee investigated the allegations and issued a rare public admonishment to Menendez in 2018 in a report that found he’d broken Senate rules and federal law by accepting gifts from a Florida eye doctor and failing to disclose those gifts.
Prosecutors noted that the gold bar scheme started soon after the publication of the Ethics Committee’s report, and asked the judge to keep that in mind at his sentencing.
“Menendez’s willingness to engage in the charged scheme immediately after receiving a formal admonition for such similar conduct speaks volumes about his character,” they said.
According to prosecutors, only 12 other U.S. senators have been charged with crimes while serving in the Senate, and of those prosecutions, only four resulted in convictions.
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