Disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Wednesday.
Prosecutors had sought 15 years behind bars for Menendez, 71, who was convicted on more than a dozen political corruption charges last summer after a jury found he accepted bribes to perform professional favors for businessmen with ties to Egypt and Qatar.
“The defendants’ crimes amount to an extraordinary attempt, at the highest levels of the Legislative Branch, to corrupt the nation’s core sovereign powers over foreign relations and law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing argument.
Attorneys for Menendez, who was found guilty on all 16 charges he faced, countered that their client was “deserving of mercy because of the penalties already imposed, his age, and the lack of a compelling need to impose a custodial sentence.”
At Wednesday’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein told Menendez he’d gone down an dishonorable path.
“Somewhere along the way, you became, I’m sorry to say, a corrupt politician,” he said, according to reporters in the courtroom.
Stein opted not to impose a financial penalty on Menendez, noting that he would not have the means to pay one.
Menendez’s lawyers made an emotional plea for leniency earlier this month, saying he was “stripped of office and living under a permanent shadow of disgrace and mockery.” They blamed his wife, Nadine Menendez, for accepting some of the bribes. She is set to stand trial in March.
Menendez, who resigned from the Senate in August, is the first sitting member of Congress to be convicted of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. He accepted the bribes while serving in a powerful position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ― a post that prosecutors said he grossly abused.
He was initially charged in 2023 after investigators found about $480,000 in cash and about $150,000 worth of gold bars at his home. A jury found that he received those gifts from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for favors, including ensuring that one of them had the exclusive right to certify that meat exported from the U.S. to Egypt conformed to Islamic dietary rules.
Prosecutors also noted that Menendez regularly promoted the aims of the Egyptian government, including by pushing his colleagues to support Egypt’s opposition to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
A superseding indictment last year also accused him of promoting the Qatari government’s interests in exchange for cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz.
Menendez has reportedly been seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump, people familiar with the efforts told NBC News earlier this month. He failed to nab a pardon from former President Joe Biden before he left office.
This isn’t Menendez’s first run-in with the law. In 2015, he was indicted on other bribery charges, but a jury was unable to reach a verdict.