As a senator, Robert Menendez towered over New Jersey and Washington. He helped rebuild after Hurricane Sandy, established a Smithsonian museum for Latino history and shaped American foreign policy.
But as Mr. Menendez’s five-decade career came to a humiliating end on Wednesday when a judge handed down a federal prison sentence, it was not bills or buildings that seemed destined to define his outsize place in this dizzying political era. It was gold bars and blaming his wife.
More than any other details of his sweeping international bribery case, those two motifs have come to stand for the improbable mash-up of gravity and tawdriness that will link the former senator and his times. A parable of modern Washington, ripped from Bravo.
Jurors actually weighed gold bars recovered from Mr. Menendez’s home in their palms last summer before they found the Democratic senator guilty of selling his high office to foreign powers and crooked businessmen.
Then they listened as his lawyers (unsuccessfully) tried to explain how a senior statesman had been duped by his real New Jersey housewife, describing the intimate details of a senatorial marriage and a hustle involving, of all things, halal meat.
“At a time when our expectations continue to get lower and lower for people in public life, the thing Bob Menendez is going to be remembered for is lowering those standards even further,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican who tangled with him for years.
“That’s a hell of an epitaph,” he added.
Many who followed the Menendez trial closely lamented that a case described by the government as one of the most serious public corruption prosecutions “in the history of the republic” did not garner even more national attention.
The most obvious explanation is that President Trump’s march back to the White House in the face of four indictments of his own made even Mr. Menendez’s case look small by comparison. At one point, the two men were on trial in adjacent courthouses in Lower Manhattan.
But if Mr. Trump got the attention, Mr. Menendez is now likely to pay something the president has not: a court-ordered price for his actions.
On Wednesday, he wiped away tears as he told Judge Sidney H. Stein that “every day I’m awake is a punishment.” But he stood stoically as Judge Stein read aloud his sentence: 11 years.
It was shorter than prosecutors asked for, but more than enough for Mr. Menendez, 71, to potentially spend much of the rest of his life in prison.
“Somewhere along the way, you became — I’m sorry to say — a corrupt politician,” the judge said to a courtroom packed with the former senator’s family and friends.
Mr. Menendez, who maintains his innocence, could still win a reversal of his conviction on appeal. His wife, Nadine Menendez, is scheduled to stand trial herself in March, after a cancer diagnosis prompted months of delay.
People close to Mr. Menendez believe there is also a possibility that Mr. Trump might pardon him or commute his sentence.
The president has publicly dangled a pardon for Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, another prominent Democrat facing federal prosecution, and already granted clemency to 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He and Mr. Menendez have a prominent connection in Charles Kushner, a New Jersey developer whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter.
But then again, Mr. Menendez voted twice to convict Mr. Trump on impeachment charges in the Senate and was one of the leading opponents of his hard-line immigration policies. And after initially accusing the Justice Department of unfairly targeting him, Mr. Menendez has largely eschewed the kind of all-out warfare that has attracted Mr. Trump’s interest in other cases.
For decades, it looked as if Mr. Menendez was building a different legacy.
He liked to boast, back then, that he had lived a “quintessential American story” as the son of Cuban immigrants who rose from a crowded tenement in New Jersey to the United States Congress. He eventually become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a leading voice on national immigration policy and a formidable political power broker back home in New Jersey.
But there were always ethical questions.
When he was a federal prosecutor, Mr. Christie spent months investigating Mr. Menendez, including whether he had improperly profited from federal grant money he helped secure. Mr. Menendez was not charged.
That changed a decade later, when prosecutors made Mr. Menendez the first sitting senator in a generation to be charged with bribery. The indictment was damning, accusing the senator of using his influence in Washington to advance the business interests of a wealthy friend in exchange for political contributions and luxury travel. But at trial, a jury deadlocked, and Mr. Menendez walked away.
He could have taken the dropped charges as a chance to rebuild his reputation. Instead, prosecutors in the current case say, he met his future wife and began spinning an even more brazen bribery web that would come to include Egypt, Qatar and a group of local businessmen and then ultimately entrap him.
“On many issues, he was a great federal representative,” said Loretta Weinberg, a former state senator and an elder stateswoman of New Jersey Democrats. But she said even for a state notorious for political corruption, Mr. Menendez seemed to ignore the risks of his situation.
“I can hear every mother saying to their young child, ‘Didn’t you learn your lesson last time?’” she said.
In July, a jury unanimously concluded that Mr. Menendez had not. He was convicted of acting as an agent of Egypt, including ghostwriting a letter for Egyptian officials to influence his Senate colleagues and steering arms to the country.
The jury also found that he interceded to try to stamp out criminal prosecutions of New Jersey businessmen. For all of it, the then-senator and his wife reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments in cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and exercise equipment.
Even for a time when most Americans view Congress as an ethical cesspool, the accusations managed to shock, again and again.
“I don’t think these can be judged as only part of a pattern of inappropriate conduct or even corruption,” said Robert Torricelli, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who faced his own ethics scandal. “There was an element here of betrayal to the country and an action contrary to national interests that was almost unique in the history of the United States Congress.”
Mr. Christie agreed that he had never seen a case quite like it, though he said the pattern was familiar to him, after having brought dozens of political corruption cases when he was a prosecutor.
“When you’re in public office, you make a trade: You get influence in return for not getting money,” he said. “If you believe that you can have influence and money as a public official at the same time, you’re probably going to go to jail.
“I think Bob Menendez just concluded he could have both,” Mr. Christie continued. “And you can’t.”
Mr. Menendez’s lawyers and those who remain loyal to him have fought to hold onto the reputation he spent so many years building. Dozens of them submitted letters pleading with Judge Stein to show leniency in his sentencing.
They described the way that the former senator had stepped in to save vital health care programs on the chopping block, serenaded friends on their birthdays and made it his “personal mission” to help New Jersey rebuild after Sandy.
One prominent lawyer, Henry J. Amoroso, recounted how the senator gently intervened at a dinner to mark his 60th birthday to help him compensate for a debilitating shoulder injury.
“During dinner, he obviously noticed I was struggling to cut my steak and without any hesitation and without bringing attention to himself, he gently leaned over with his own knife, grabbing my fork and cutting my steak for me while remaining completely engaged in conversation,” Mr. Amoroso wrote.
But even those closest to Mr. Menendez acknowledged the futility of their task.
In her own letter to the judge, Alicia Menendez, an MSNBC anchor and the former senator’s only daughter, lamented that he had already lost his job in the Senate. His name, she said, was recently taken off an elementary school near her home.
“A legacy of service 51 years in the making,” she wrote, “has been reduced to a punchline about gold bars.”
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