Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez faces the possibility of a long prison term when he is sentenced Wednesday for selling his once-considerable clout in Washington for gold bars, a luxury car and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bribes.
Prosecutors have asked a judge to give the Democrat 15 years behind bars for crimes that include acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.
Menendez's lawyers say he deserves less than two years in prison, citing his decades of public service and a life largely well-lived after the son of Cuban immigrants rose from poverty to become “the epitome of the American Dream.”
Two New Jersey businessmen convicted of paying bribes to the senator, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, also face sentencing Wednesday. Judge Sidney H. Stein will sentence them first before dealing with Menendez in the afternoon. A third businessman pleaded guilty and testified against Menendez at a trial last year.
Menendez resigned from the Senate after his conviction last year, though he lost much of his power in fall 2023 when the charges against him were revealed and he was forced to surrender his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The trial traced Menendez’s dealings with Egyptian officials and his quest to aid three men who showered him with lucrative gifts found during a 2022 raid on the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home he shared with his wife, Nadine.
FBI agents who searched the house found $480,000 in cash, some of it stuffed inside boots and the pockets of clothing hung in the couple's closets. They also seized gold bars worth an estimated $150,000.
Prosecutors said Menendez had “put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes,” including by serving Egypt’s interests as he worked to protect a meat certification monopoly Hana had established with the Egyptian government.
Among other things, Menendez provided Egyptian officials with information about the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and ghostwrote a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in military aid to Egypt.
Prosecutors said that for other bribes, Menendez attempted to persuade a federal prosecutor in New Jersey to go easy on Daibes, a politically influential real estate developer accused of bank fraud.
And at the trial, another businessman, Jose Uribe, testified that he helped Nadine Menendez get a Mercedes-Benz convertible after the senator sought to pressure state prosecutors to drop criminal probes of his associates.
Menendez has insisted that he is innocent of any crime, saying repeatedly that his interactions with Egyptian officials were normal for the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and that he always put American interests first. He denied taking any bribes and said the gold bars belonged to his wife.
Nadine Menendez faces trial in March on many of the same charges as her husband after spending the last year battling breast cancer.
Prosecutors said in a court filing that long prison terms are a warranted punishment “for this extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of the public trust.”
“The defendants engaged, for years, in a corruption and foreign influence scheme of stunning brazenness, breadth, and duration, resulting in exceptionally grave abuses of power at the highest levels of the Legislative Branch of the United States Government," they wrote.
Menendez’s lawyers, in a presentence submission, said he had already suffered greatly.
“Unsurprisingly, Senator Menendez’s conviction has rendered him a national punchline and stripped him of every conceivable personal, professional, and financial benefit,” his lawyers wrote. “Bob is now 71, with his long-built reputation in tatters. He has suffered financial and professional ruin."
Menendez's law license has been suspended and will be revoked if his conviction stands. His state pension is in jeopardy. His name has already been stripped from an elementary school in New Jersey.
“His once broad circle of friends and political allies have largely disappeared,” his lawyers said. “While all defendants suffer inevitable personal and professional consequences if convicted of serious federal crimes, Senator Menendez in many important respects has already been punished relatively more harshly due to his position.”
In court papers, the lawyers described how Menendez devoted much of his life to his country and his community after he was scarred by the early loss of his father, who killed himself when Menendez was 23 after he was unable to pay off gambling debts.
They described a 50-year history of public service in heroic terms, tracing a career in which Menendez was mayor of Union City, New Jersey, a state lawmaker, a member of the U.S. House and then a senator from 2006 to 2024.
Yet he also had the distinction of being the only U.S. senator indicted twice.
In 2015, he was charged with selling his influence to a wealthy Florida eye doctor and entrepreneur who prosecutors said lavished him with luxury vacations and campaign contributions. But the jury in that case couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. Federal prosecutors dropped the case rather than put him on trial again.
