NEW YORK — Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced Wednesday to 11 years in prison for accepting bribes of gold and cash and acting as an agent of Egypt — crimes his own lawyer said earned him the nickname “Gold Bar Bob.”
U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein announced the sentence after the Democrat tearfully addressed the judge, saying he’d lost everything he cared about, except for his family.
“You were successful, powerful, you stood at the apex of our political system,” the judge said. ”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’s actions, the judge said, feeds the cynicism of voters.
“What’s been the result?” he said, noting a lengthy investigation of a five-year crime. “You lost your senate seat. You lost your chairmanship and you lost your good name.”
Menendez, 71, who tearfully told the judge in court that he was chastened, was defiant when he stepped before cameras at a bank of microphones outside the Manhattan courthouse, saying: “I am innocent.”
He then railed against the judicial system and aligned himself with President Donald Trump’s recent criticisms of the judicial system, particularly in New York City.
“President Trump is right. This process is political and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system,” he said, reading from a sheet of paper and calling himself the victim of “the Wild West of political prosecutions.”
Prosecutors had requested a 15-year prison term for Menendez, who was convicted of multiple charges including acting as an agent for Egypt for selling his once-considerable clout in Washington for bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Menendez: I’ve done more good than bad
Given a chance to speak in court, Menendez broke down several times as he described his accomplishments.
“You really don’t know the man you are about to sentence,” Menendez told Stein as he stood before him with his hands in his pockets, except when he wiped his face several times with a tissue.
“Your honor, I am far from a perfect man. I have made more than my share of mistakes and bad decisions,” he added. “I’ve done far more good than bad. I ask you, your honor, to judge me in that context.”
Attorney Adam Fee told Stein to give Menendez credit for a “lifetime of extraordinary public service and personal sacrifices.”
“Despite his decades of service, he is now known more widely as Gold Bar Bob,” Fee said.
Menendez’s lawyers had said prior to the sentencing that their client deserves less than two years in prison, describing how the son of Cuban immigrants rose from poverty to become “the epitome of the American Dream” before his conviction had “rendered him a national punchline.”
He’d beaten a prosecution once before.
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.
Businessmen sentenced
Before sentencing Menendez, Stein sentenced two men convicted of bribing Menendez, giving Fred Daibes, a real estate developer, a seven-year prison term and Wael Hana, an entrepreneur, eight years behind bars.
Prior to the announcement of his sentence, Daibes, 67, tearfully told Stein the jury verdict had left him “borderline suicidal,” and requested leniency so that he could care for his 30-year-old autistic son.
Hana told the judge, “I am an innocent man.”
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.
Wife faces trial
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. His wife faces a March trial on many of the same charges as her husband.
FBI agents who searched the house found $480,000, 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.
In court papers, Menendez’s 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.
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