Former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was sentenced Wednesday to 11 years in prison for trading bribes for political favors.
Federal prosecutors levied allegations of bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent against Menendez, then chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last fall.
This summer, he became the first public official ever convicted of acting as a foreign agent while in office.
A New York jury found the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars and luxury cars from three New Jersey businessmen.
In exchange, the senator protected the halal meat certification monopoly of one of the businessmen, Wael Hana, in exchange for lucrative kickbacks and intervened in separate criminal cases involving the other two men, Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes.
Before the judge handed down his sentence Wednesday, Menendez tearfully asked for leniency over his decades of public service.
“You really don’t know the man you are about to sentence,” the ex-senator told U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein, according to the Associated Press.
Menendez’s attorneys argued that the case made him a “national punchline,” earning him the nickname “gold bar Bob,” which should serve as punishment in its own right. But the judge was not convinced.
“You were successful, powerful, you stood at the apex of our political system,” Stein said, according to the AP. ”Somewhere along the way, and I don’t know when it was, you lost your way and working for the public good became working for your good.”
Menendez was ordered to report to prison by June 6.
Hana was also sentenced Wednesday to just over eight years in prison and Daibes to a seven-year prison term.
Uribe, who pleaded guilty before facing trial, is set to be sentenced in June. Nadine Menendez’s trial has been postponed several times due to ongoing breast cancer treatment and is now scheduled to begin in March.
As the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez signed off on several multimillion-dollar weapons sales to Egypt, which he repeatedly asked his wife to relay to the businessmen, who then passed on the intel to Egyptian officials, between 2018 and 2022.
Following a nine-week trial, Menendez was found guilty on all 16 counts he faced. He soon after resigned from Congress.
Federal prosecutors sought a 15-year prison term for Menendez, whose conduct they said constituted an “extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of the public trust.”
“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,” the government wrote in its sentencing memorandum.
However, the recommendation is a downward departure from federal sentencing guidelines, which suggested a 24-to-30-year prison term. Prosecutors said the request for a lower — albeit still significant — sentence was “based principally” on Menendez’s age.
The sentencing came on the heels of the judge’s decision not to toss Menendez’s corruption conviction or grant a new trial, despite jurors having access to trial exhibits without proper redactions during their deliberations.
Menendez’s attorney previously requested a prison term of no more than two years, but after the ex-senator’s co-defendants were sentenced to seven and eight years, respectively, he changed his request to a maximum of eight years.
Though the judge determined there was an “infinitesimal chance” the jurors even viewed the mistakenly sent materials, the former senator has repeatedly claimed prosecutorial misconduct and vowed to appeal.
The Associated Press contributed.
Updated at 4:09 pm EST.
