Menendez Indicted
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Former U.S. Sen. 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 lawyer said he’s been mocked for as “Gold Bar Bob.”
The judge delivered the sentence after Menendez tearfully addressed the court, saying he’d lost everything he cared about, except his family. The Democrat resigned last year after becoming one of only a handful of U.S. senators ever convicted while in office.
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The ex-senator was convicted of selling his once-considerable clout for bribes worth a fortune. FBI agents who searched his house found $480,000, some of it stuffed inside boots and pockets of clothing, and gold bars worth an estimated $150,000.
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Menendez, 71, portrayed himself to the judge as a sympathetic figure, stressing his decades of public service and declaring that he was chastened by the experience. Afterward, talking to reporters with TV cameras and microphones outside, he turned defiant.
“I am innocent,” he proclaimed, vowing to appeal.
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Nadine Menendez was sentenced to four and a half years behind bars Thursday for her role in a yearslong international bribery scheme that landed her husband, former Sen. Bob Menendez, in a federal prison in June.
She cried as she told U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein during her sentencing hearing at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse in Manhattan that she blames her husband for her criminal troubles.
“I was wrong about my husband,” Menendez said in court, according to the New York Daily News. “I now know, he’s not my savior. He’s not the man I thought he was. I should have asked more questions. I should have known better.”
