“Your honor, you have before you a chastened man,” Menendez, 71, said before choking up.
“I have dedicated my entire life to the service of others,” he said, dabbing his eyes with a tissue. “I am far from a perfect man, but I believe in my half-century of public service, I have done more good than bad.”
The waterworks came before Manhattan federal Judge Sidney Stein handed the sentence to the three-term Democrat — who resigned in disgrace in August after a jury found him guilty of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in payola in exchange for protecting and enriching businessmen and foreign governments.
“Somewhere along the way, you became, I’m sorry to say, a corrupt politician,” Stein told the disgraced pol.
The former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — tasked with approving massive sums of lethal military aid — did favors for Egypt and Qatar while go-betweens showered him and his wife, Nadine, with cash, gold bars, the luxury car, checks for a no-show job and payouts to a sham “consulting” firm, trial evidence revealed.
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Nadine Menendez asked an Egyptian official while her international affairs honcho hubby smoked cigars and swigged red wine at a May 2019 meeting at Morton’s Steakhouse, an FBI agent who secretly observed the scene testified.
Agents who raided the Menendezes’ cluttered Englewood Cliffs house in June 2022 found 13 gold bars worth $150,000 tucked inside a bedroom safe. Nearly $500,000 in cash was spread out all over the house— including wads of bills totaling $14,500 piled into a pair of Timberland work boots, and cash-filled envelopes stuffed into the pockets of his official Senate jacket.
Menendez did not testify during the nine-week trial. But his older sister tried to downplay the cash trove as an innocuous decades-long habit stemming from his distrust of banks due to their Cuban heritage.
“It’s a Cuban thing,” Caridad Gonzalez testified.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Menendez to at least 15 years in prison. They pointed out that the case was the first time that any US Senator — or any public official, for that matter — was found guilty of serving as an illegal “foreign agent” while in office.
“Menendez, who swore an oath to represent the United States and the State of New Jersey, instead put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes,” the feds wrote.
Defense attorneys had urged the judge to have “mercy” on Menendez, and impose a sentence of less than two years.
The guilty verdict has already “rendered him a national punchline and stripped him of every conceivable personal, professional, and financial benefit,” the lawyers argued in court papers.
Continue reading at the New York Post…
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