June 17 (UPI) — Ex-U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez will start his 11-year prison term Tuesday after his conviction last year on a slew of corruption and bribery charges, including acting as an unauthorized foreign agent.
Menendez, New Jersey’s 71-year-old former Democratic senior senator and past chair of the Senate’s powerful Foreign Relations Committee, was found guilty in June 2024 in New York’s Southern District on 16 charges.
Those charges included that he and his wife, Nadine, accepted bribes in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars and a luxury car from at least three Garden State businessmen in exchange for political clout, and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt and aided Qatar.
He is expected to report to a federal correctional institution in Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania a little more than two hours from his New Jersey home. The federal facility in Minersville, a duel medium-minimum security prison, houses about 1,200 inmates.
He was sentenced in January by U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein but granted a prison delay to attend his stepdaughters wedding last week.
“You stood at the apex of our political system,” Stein told Menendez at sentencing. “Somewhere along the way, you lost your way.”
In addition, Menendez was ordered to forfeit more than $900,000 in restitution.
Last week, a federal appeals court denied his last-minute bid to avoid jail in a close 2-1 vote as he appeals his 2024 conviction.
His attorneys argued that Menendez’s more than 10 years behind bars is, in essence, a “life and death sentence” for the Senate’s former foreign relations chief.
Menendez, who was charged before he resigned in August, ended up as the first sitting member of Congress to be convicted of acting as a foreign agent.
A 2017 federal bribery trial on previous charges against Menendez ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a verdict.
The New Jersey Democrat, who had been in both houses of Congress since 1993, recently made overtures on social media to President Donald Trump conceivably to further a pardon.
Sentencing guidelines suggest that Menendez serve 24 to 30 years in prison while the U.S. Probation Office calls for 12 years in prison.
Meanwhile, the former senator revealed in May that his wife reportedly has breast cancer.
Nadine Menendez, 58, was accused of accepting bribes as a “go-between” figure for her husband and New Jersey business people Wael Hana, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe.
In April, she was convicted on all 15 counts by a federal jury and is set to be sentenced on September 11.
