Former Sen. Bob Menendez is scheduled to turn himself in Tuesday at a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin serving an 11-year sentence on bribery charges.
An attorney for Menendez, 71, has called the punishment a “life and death sentence” given his age, and the senator has tried unsuccessfully to get a pardon or commutation from then-President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
The Democrat, once the senior senator from New Jersey and the chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was found guilty in July of taking part in a bribery scheme that rewarded him and his wife Nadine Menendez with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold bars and stacks of cash.
Prosecutors alleged Menendez took the payoffs from some New Jersey businessmen in exchange for the senator’s taking actions to benefit them and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
The bribes included gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz given to Nadine Menendez and more than $480,000 in cash, which the FBI found stuffed into closets, jackets bearing Menendez’s name and other clothing when it searched his New Jersey home in 2022.
He was convicted of extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent.
Nadine Menendez was convicted in a separate trial and is scheduled to be sentenced in September. Her trial had been pushed back to allow her time to undergo cancer treatments. Her husband had been allowed to delay the date he had to surrender to prison in order to support her during her trial.
Menendez had also asked an appeals court to let him remain free while he appeals his conviction, a request that was rejected by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
Allies of Menendez have made multiple overtures to Trump to secure a pardon or a commutation of his sentence, NBC News has previously reported, but to no avail so far. Trump has granted a number of pardons in public corruption cases since taking office in Janu, but they have gone to people who have supported him.
Menendez was an outspoken critic of Trump during the president’s first term, and voted against him in both of his impeachment trials.
In the months since his conviction, Menendez has adopted some of the language Trump used when he was being prosecuted by the Justice Department, saying he’s the victim of a political “witch hunt” and “weaponization” at the DOJ.
He will serve his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill. The facility is a medium-security prison with an adjacent minimum-security camp.
