Bob Menéndez Sencing scheduled for Wednesday – NBC New York

The former American senator Bob Menéndez faces the possibility of a long prison when he is sentenced on Wednesday for selling his influence once considerable in Washington by gold bars, a luxury car and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in cash.

Prosecutors have asked a judge to give the Democrat 15 years after bars for crimes that include acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.

Menéndez’s lawyers say that he deserves less than two years in prison, citing his decades of public service and a greatly lived life after the son of Cuban immigrants left poverty to become “the epitome of the American dream” .

Two businessmen from New Jersey sentenced to pay bribes to the senator, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, also face sentences on Wednesday. Judge Sidney H. Stein will sentence them first before dealing with Menéndez in the afternoon. A third businessman declared himself guilty and testified against Menéndez in a trial last year.

Menéndez resigned from the Senate after his conviction last year, although he lost much of his power in the fall of 2023 when the charges against him were revealed and was forced to deliver his powerful position as president of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .

The trial tralated Menéndez with Egyptian officials and his search to help three men who bathed him with lucrative gifts found during a 2022 raid in the Clewood cliffs, New Jersey, a home he shared with his wife, Nadine.

The FBI agents who registered the house found $ 480,000 in cash, some fillings inside the boots and clothing pockets hung in the couple’s closets. They also confiscated gold bars worth approximately $ 150,000.

The prosecutors said that Menéndez had “put on sale his high position in exchange for this Treasury of bribes”, even serving the interests of Egypt while working to protect a meat certification monopoly that Hana had established with the Egyptian government.

Among other things, Menéndez provided Egyptian officials with information about the United States embassy staff in Cairo and Ghost wrote a letter to fellow senators who encouraged them to withdraw $ 300 million in military aid from Egypt.

Prosecutors said that for other bribes, Menéndez tried to persuade a federal prosecutor in New Jersey to be easy with Daibes, a politically influential real estate developer accused of bank fraud.

And at the trial, another businessman, José Uribe, testified that he helped Nadine Menéndez obtain a Mercedes-Benz convertible after the senator sought to press State prosecutors to eliminate the criminal probes of his associates.

Menéndez has insisted that he is innocent of any crime, repeatedly saying that his interactions with Egyptian officials were normal for the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and that he always puts the US interests first. He denied taking bribes and said that the gold bars belonged to his wife.

Nadine Menéndez faces trial in March for many of the same positions as her husband after spending the last year fighting breast cancer.

Prosecutors said in court that presents that long prison periods are justified punishment “for this extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of public confidence.”

“The defendants participated, for years, in a scheme of corruption and foreign influence of impressive impact, amplitude and duration, which resulted in abuses of exceptionally serious power at the highest levels of the legislative branch of the United States government “They wrote.

Menéndez’s lawyers, in a presentation presentation, said he had already suffered a lot.

“As expected, the senator of Senator Menéndez has made a national phrase and stripped it of each personal, professional and financial benefit conceivable,” their lawyers wrote. “Bob is now 71 years old, with his reputation long built in Jirones. He has suffered a financial and professional ruin. “

Menéndez’s legal license has been suspended and will be revoked if his conviction is. His state pension is in danger. His name has already been stripped of a primary school in New Jersey.

“His wide circle of friends and political allies has disappeared to a large extent,” said his lawyers. “While all defendants suffer inevitable personal and professional consequences if it is convicted of serious federal crimes, Senator Menéndez in many important aspects has already been punished with relative harder due to their position.”

In the judicial documents, the lawyers described how Menéndez dedicated much of his life to his country and his community after he was marked by the early loss of his father, who committed suicide when Menéndez was 23 years after he could not pay the game debts.

They described a 50 -year history of public service in heroic terms, tracking a career in which Menéndez was mayor of Union City, New Jersey, a state legislator, a member of the United States Chamber and then a senator from 2006 to 2024.

However, he also had the distinction of being the only American senator accused twice.

In 2015, he was accused of selling his influence to a rich doctor from Florida and an entrepreneur who, according to prosecutors, produced luxury vacations and campaign contributions. But the jury in that case could not reach a unanimous verdict. Federal prosecutors dropped the case instead of putting it in trial again.