Former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery
In taking illegal gifts and advancing the interests of Egypt’s government, the former senator “betrayed the voters of New Jersey,” the judge said.
![Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey will be sentenced for bribery and corruption charges Wednesday.](https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/v2/FIVH5Y4WQUYER2SXXKMIQDQDEM.jpg?auth=df6552e8696fa6f21fe9eda571b48024424f4d848536cfb9af25606729a5f436&width=760&height=507&smart=true)
NEW YORK — Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was sentenced Wednesday to 11 years in federal prison for selling the powers of his office to wealthy benefactors and acting as a foreign agent for the Egyptian government — capping a historic fall from grace for the once-prominent Democrat, who spent five decades rising through the nation’s halls of power.
U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein said the penalty — one of the longest ever given to a federal legislator — reflected the seriousness of Menendez’s crimes, which he said were motivated by “greed” and “hubris” and “betrayed the voters of New Jersey.”
Menendez was convicted last year of accepting bribes, including gold bars, cash, and a Mercedes-Benz, both to advance the interests of three New Jersey businessmen and to secretly advance the interests of Egyptian officials.
“You were successful, powerful,” Stein told Menendez, 71, whose political career began on a local school board at age 20, and ended with him serving as chair of the prominent Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “You stood at the apex of our political system.”
But, the judge added: ”Somewhere along the way, you lost your way, and working for the public good became working for your good.”
Earlier in the hearing, Menendez had asked Stein for leniency, choking up when recalling acts that he said displayed his lifelong dedication to public service, including advocating for lifesaving medical care for constituents and seeking to help homeowners recoup higher insurance payments after Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey.
He did not, however, mention the crimes for which he was convicted except to say that he had lost nearly everything he had worked for in the wake of his conviction.
”Other than family,” he said, “I have lost everything.”
And afterward, while addressing a large crowd of news reporters, Menendez was unrepentant, describing the Manhattan federal courthouse where he was tried and sentenced as the “Wild West of political prosecutions” and going out of his way to praise President Donald Trump, a Republican who has repeatedly attacked the justice system as corrupt.
“President Trump is right — this process is political and is corrupted to the core,” Menendez said. “I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
Menendez left without taking questions and did not say whether he planned to ask Trump for a pardon. He was ordered to surrender to begin his sentence in June.
Thursday’s hearing was an unseemly bookend to a political career in which Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, had vaulted to the upper crust of American society.
While addressing the judge, Menendez recalled how he got his start in politics, including by testifying against a local mayor in a corruption trial — an episode he said required him to wear a bulletproof vest due to threats against his life — and then winning election to the Union City school board and later serving as that city’s mayor.
His steady ascent continued as he won election to offices with increasingly higher profiles over the years. And in 2006, he was elected to the U.S. Senate — the first person of Hispanic descent to serve in that role for New Jersey, he said.
His attorneys sought to highlight his decades of good works for Stein, the judge, and asked for a sentence of no longer than eight years, saying that to do so could doom Menendez to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“He deserves punishment,” said attorney Adam Fee. “He does not deserve to die in prison.”
Prosecutors, however, asked the judge to imprison Menendez for 15 years, saying his case marked the first time that an American elected official had been found guilty of working on behalf of a foreign government, and writing that his conduct was “perhaps more serious than that for which any other Senator has been convicted in United States history.”
The case was “a window into what the defendant believed,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni. “He believed the power he wielded belonged to him.”
Menendez was convicted in July of accepting bribes to advance the interests of three businessmen. Among other crimes, prosecutors said, Menendez lobbied a federal agency to grant one of the men — Wael Hana — a monopoly on certain meat exports from the United States to Egypt. Hana and another businessman, Fred Daibes, were convicted alongside Menendez at trial, while a third, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty and testified against them.
Hana was sentenced Wednesday to more than eight years in prison, while Daibes received a seven-year sentence.
Prosecutors said Menendez took other troubling actions after receiving the bribes, including promoting the views of the Egyptian government, briefing Egyptian officials on pointed questions other senators might ask them, and helping ghostwrite a letter justifying alleged human rights abuses that occurred there.
“Menendez literally not just took the side of, but secretly authored a response in the voice of, a foreign government against his own fellow U.S. Senators,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.
He also tried to quash criminal investigations in the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office at Uribe’s request, prosecutors said. And in exchange for Menendez’s help, Uribe testified, he gave Menendez’s wife, Nadine, the Mercedes-Benz. (Nadine Menendez was also charged in the case, but she is still awaiting trial because she has been receiving treatment for breast cancer.)
Monteleoni, the prosecutor, said Menendez tried to “liquidate” his power into cash and gold bars, and pointed out that Menendez did so even after he had been admonished years earlier by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting gifts from donors that he failed to disclose.
Menendez tried to convince Stein, the judge, that losing his career and livelihood was enough to spare him from a lengthy term of incarceration. He resigned his seat in August after a wide array of officials called for him to step down. Former U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat, won the election to fill Menendez’s former seat in November.
And Menendez’s lawyer said the public shame that has accompanied his conviction will follow him forever.
“He is now widely known as ‘Gold Bar Bob,’” said the lawyer, Fee.
Stein, however, was not swayed.
“People have to understand,” he said, “that when there’s wrongdoing of this magnitude, there are serious consequences.”