Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s Disgraced Ex-Senator, Heads to Prison

Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s former senior senator, reported to a federal prison in Pennsylvania Tuesday morning to begin serving an 11-year sentence for selling his political power to two foreign governments and three businessmen in exchange for gold bars, cash, a luxury car, and other riches.

Menendez, 71, is donning a prison jumpsuit 11 days later than U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein initially decreed when he sentenced him in January, after successfully seeking a delay so he could attend his stepdaughter’s wedding last weekend.

Menendez, a longtime Democrat who served in Congress from 1993 until he resigned last August, tried for another reprieve this month, asking the courts to allow him to remain free on bail pending the outcome of an appeal. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said no.

Similarly, Menendez’s overtures to President Donald Trump for a pardon, both on social media and behind the scenes, have not proven persuasive with the White House or the public.

“Shut up,” wrote one X user, after Menendez posted a thread on June 11 complaining of prosecutors “weaponizing” the criminal justice system.

The federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that Menendez reported as scheduled Tuesday morning to the Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, a medium-security lockup about 160 miles west of his Englewood Cliffs home.

Menendez had long been a popular leader, comfortably winning reelection in 2018 even after a separate bribery indictment ended in a 2017 mistrial.

But his July conviction and impending imprisonment sent shock waves through political circles in New Jersey and nationally, given how slippery public officials have historically been in being brought to justice for corruption.

He became the first sitting senator to be convicted of acting as a foreign agent, arguably the most alarming of 16 charges prosecutors filed against him, due to its national security implications. He was chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee when federal prosecutors in New York indicted him and his wife Nadine in September 2023 for accepting bribes to take actions that benefitted Egypt, Qatar, and New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana, Fred Daibes, and Jose Uribe.

“I think Sen. Menendez had a long career in which he did a lot of good for the country and the state. It’s always sad to see somebody like that do things that merit this kind of accountability,” said Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who represented New Jersey’s 7^th District in Congress for two terms when Menendez was a senator.

Still, Malinowski, who now leads the Hunterdon County Democrats, noted that Menendez likely would not be headed to prison today, had Trump instead of former President Joe Biden been in the White House when prosecutors first set their sights on him.

“They’ve stopped enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” Malinowski said. “I don’t think that Bob Menendez would have been prosecuted under the Trump administration. I’m proud, as a Democrat, that an administration led by my party was even-handed in its pursuit of public integrity.”

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight, a D.C.-based national nonprofit watchdog, agreed that Menendez might be “part of a bygone era,” as a politician locked away for corruption.

Corruption will not only go unpunished but it will flourish under Trump, who has used his position to vastly expand his fortune, said Hedtler-Gaudette, the group’s vice president of policy and government affairs.

“The fish is rotting from the head down, because the President clearly does not care about these issues as principles,” he said. “He and his family are violating every possible principle or precept of ethical government — their stablecoin and the dinners they’re having and what amounted to direct payments through crypto assets. They’re just doing all of this stuff right out in the open. And so it creates an environment where it’s going to incentivize other people to keep doing things that are unethical and corrupt.”

Still, Menendez won’t be the last politician in prosecutors’ crosshairs, he added.

“They will selectively use the apparatus of the state to go after political opponents,” he said. “They’ve got no problem charging Congresswoman LaMonica McIver for essentially trying to do her job at an ICE detention facility. So the thing that really concerns people like me, an organization like mine, is that you may actually see an increase in members of Congress being targeted or investigated by the Department of Justice on the basis of political, partisan targeting.”

Malinowski and Hedtler-Gaudette agree that Trump seems unlikely to pardon Menendez as he has so many others.

Still, Malinowski predicted a pardon will come. But it won’t likely be Menendez who walks out of prison, he said.

“There’s a very active effort to secure a pardon” for Hana, Malinowski said.

Hana, who’s Egyptian-American, was convicted alongside Menendez of bribing the senator to help him secure a halal meat-exporting monopoly in Egypt.

Malinowski co-chaired the Egypt Human Rights Caucus in Congress, served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, and was the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

“We tend to see this case as a corruption case. It was also a foreign influence and espionage case,” Malinowski said. “The President of Egypt has been lobbying very, very hard to get Hana a pardon, and I think that’s more likely to happen. From General (Abdel Fattah) Sisi’s point of view, it’s an opportunity to show that if you do something for the motherland, the motherland will stand by you.”

Attorney Lawrence Lustberg, who represented Hana at trial, did not respond to a request for comment.