Former Sen. Bob Menendez began his 11-year prison sentence Tuesday morning, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said.
The New Jersey Democrat, 71, was at the height of his power in 2023, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when federal prosecutors in New York revealed allegations based on a yearslong investigation that he’d sold his office for piles of cash and bars of gold.
Now, he’s at Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania.
Following a two-month trial last summer, a jury found Menendez guilty on 16 counts, including bribery, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, obstruction of justice, extortion and conspiring to commit those crimes along with a pair of businesspeople.
The businesspeople — Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American, and Fred Daibes, a prominent real estate developer — already began their sentences of eight and seven years, respectively.
Menendez is one of only a few senators to have ever served time and the last since another New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Harrison Williams Jr., went to prison in the 1980s after being caught up in the FBI’s Abscam sting operation.
Before he was sentenced in January, Menendez and his attorney asked for mercy — arguing he’d already been punished, having lost public office and being subjected to widespread mockery as “Gold Bar Bob.”
“Other than family, I have lost everything I ever cared about,” a tearful Menendez told U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein. Present in the courtroom were his two adult children, including his son, Rep. Rob Menendez.
Stein did not spare him, though, and said Menendez had succumbed to greed and hubris, going from someone who had stood up to corruption in New Jersey politics early in his career to someone who now himself was corrupt.
“Somewhere along the way, I don’t know where, you lost your way,” Stein said.
Menendez has in recent weeks taken to social media to decry the case against him, posts that many view as attempts to get a pardon from President Donald Trump. The federal investigation of Menendez appears to have begun in 2019, when Trump was president.
Menendez, Daibes and Hana are still appealing their convictions, with a team of experienced attorneys who have vowed to fight as long as it takes. There are issues in the case, including the scope of the Constitution’s “speech or debate” protections, that seem destined to intrigue appeals court judges and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court.
In particular, Menendez’s appeal focuses on rulings Stein made during the trial. Menendez objected to some of the evidence that prosecutors were allowed to share with jurors. Then, after the trial, prosecutors admitted even some evidence the judge ruled should not be shown to jurors was provided to jurors on a laptop they had access to during their deliberations.
While it wasn’t enough to keep him from starting his sentence, Menendez persuaded one judge in three-judge appeals court panel to last week back his request for bail pending appeal.
During a separate hearing, Daibes attorney Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general for President George W. Bush, also seemed to get appeals court judges’ attention on the speech or debate issues in the case.
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