Former Sen. Bob Menendez faces sentencing in corruption case

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Bob Menendez is set to be sentenced Wednesday in New York in a sweeping federal corruption case, where the 71-year-old former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will seek to avoid a lengthy prison term.

Prosecutors have recommended that the New Jersey Democrat receive at least 15 years in prison, which his lawyers argued is “vindictive and cruel” in part because it would endanger him by making him ineligible for a minimum-security prison.

“As a result of his position in government, the notoriety associated with his criminal investigation and trial, and the public reporting of gold bars and cash seized from his home, Senator Menendez is at a far greater risk than the typical inmate — even the typical well-known inmate — of violence, extortion, and harassment in prison,” the former senator’s attorneys wrote in a court filing.

And they say prosecutors, ahead of the sentencing, mischaracterized the evidence of Menendez’s role and are making “bombastic accusations — in pursuit of a request that the Court essentially lock up the Senator and throw away the key.”

Menendez’s attorneys have told the judge that a prison term of no more than 27 months is sufficient considering his “lifetime of good deeds and good character, his zero-percent likelihood of recidivism, and the punishment he has already sustained due to his conviction.”

Prosecutors have spotlighted Menendez’s conduct as historic: It’s the first case where a U.S. senator was found guilty of a crime involving the abuse of a Senate committee leadership position, and the first in which a senator was found guilty of serving as a foreign agent while working as a public official, they said. Menendez was tried alongside two co-defendants last summer.

A federal jury rejected defense arguments that there were other reasons for the cash stockpile and gold bars that authorities found at the New Jersey residence the senator shared with his wife, Nadine, who is set to go on trial in March. During the trial, an FBI agent testified that authorities seized gold bars and about $486,000 in cash during a 2022 search of the residence.

Menendez was found guilty last summer on 16 counts, including bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent. Menendez’s lawyers have said he will appeal the case.

Menendez, in exchange for bribes, promised to approve military aid to Egypt, to pressure the New Jersey attorney general to disrupt a criminal probe and to recommend someone for a U.S. attorney post who he thought he could influence to affect a federal case against a real estate developer, according to prosecutors.

In their sentencing memorandum, the prosecution argued that Menendez’s conduct was “perhaps more serious than that for which any other Senator has been convicted in United States history.”

“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, even adjusting for inflation,” according to the filing.

The crimes of Menendez and the other defendants, prosecutors said, amounted 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.”

Menendez’s lawyers argue the government has put forward a “hyperbolic screed filled with overheated rhetoric that is divorced from the actual evidence.”

“The evidence offered at trial is largely divorced from the highly misleading presentation in the government’s submission,” according to the filing from Menendez’s attorneys. “It presents a fictionalized account of Senator Menendez’s conduct, aiming for maximum emotional (and media) impact, rather than justice.”

In other court filings, Menendez attorneys submitted a raft of letters of support for the former lawmaker, including letters from family members of Menendez.

Among the filings was a letter from his son, Rep. Rob Menendez, D-N.J., who touched on his father’s career and implored the judge to give his father the “opportunity for his remaining time to be spent with his grandchildren.”

“For all those days, weeks, years and precious moments that he missed in furtherance of all the causes you will read about in other letters, I believe he is deserving of the opportunity to pick up my son and daughter from school, be there for their games, plays, and ballets (or whatever it is that they choose to pursue),” Rob Menendez wrote.

Earlier this month, a federal judge denied the former senator’s push for a new trial.

Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote that the government, months after the jury verdict, discovered that “several improperly redacted exhibits had been loaded onto the laptop that had been provided to the jury” during deliberations, news that prompted defendants to push for a new trial.

But Stein denied that effort, finding the defendants were “not prejudiced” by the material that was improperly redacted.

“It is extraordinarily unlikely that the jury was even aware of the minuscule amount of extra-record material on the laptop,” the judge wrote. “The extra-record material was a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence.”

Stein wrote that both the government and the defense failed to spot the improper redactions during their review of the laptop, and the judge said “it was the government that disclosed the error to defense counsel.”

“Even in the infinitesimal chance that the jury happened upon this evidence, there is similarly a minuscule likelihood that the jury would have understood it, much less attribute the significance to these exhibits that the defendants now do,” the judge wrote.

The former senator, in a social media post, said he expected an appellate court to “hold these prosecutors to account for their misconduct.”

“To think that prosecutors can put unconstitutional and inadmissible evidence in front of the jury, assure the defense they only provided the jury with admitted exhibits, and escape any consequences, is outrageous,” he said in the post.

The former lawmaker added: “This is precisely the sort of misconduct by prosecutors that has caused so many to question the motives and judgments of overzealous prosecutors.”

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