Former Sen. Bob Menendez turned himself in Tuesday at a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin serving an 11-year sentence on bribery charges.
An attorney for Menendez, D-Pa., 71, has called the punishment a "life and death sentence" given his age, and Menendez has tried unsuccessfully to get a pardon or a commutation from Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Menendez, once the senior senator from New Jersey and the chair of the powerful 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 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 in 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 was pushed back to allow her time to undergo cancer treatments. Her husband was allowed to delay the date he had to surrender to prison 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 the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected last week.
Allies of Menendez have made multiple overtures to Trump to secure a pardon or a commutation, NBC News has reported, but to no avail. Trump has granted a number of pardons in public corruption cases since he returned to office in January, but they have gone to people who have supported him.
Menendez was an outspoken critic of Trump during his first term and voted against him in both of his impeachment trials.
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 Justice Department.
He will serve his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill. The facility is a medium-security prison with an adjacent minimum-security camp.
