Top Democrat faces growing calls to resign after being found guilty of accepting cash, gold bars and other bribes.
Top United States Senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of all 16 criminal counts he faced in a widely watched corruption trial in New York, including bribery and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
A Manhattan federal court jury delivered its verdict on Tuesday after deliberating for more than 12 hours over three days.
After the verdict was read out, Menendez rested his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together, and stared straight ahead. He said afterwards that he plans to appeal.
“I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent,” Menendez said.
Prosecutors had accused Menendez, a New Jersey lawmaker and an influential figure in the Democratic Party, of taking part in overlapping bribery schemes in which he and his wife accepted bribes from three businessmen who wanted Menendez’s help.
In exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and car and mortgage payments, Menendez helped steer billions of dollars in US aid to Egypt, where one of the businessmen, Wael Hana, had ties to government officials, according to prosecutors.
Menendez also was accused of seeking to influence criminal probes involving two other businessmen, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe.
Hana and Daibes were co-defendants in the US senator’s trial and were also convicted on each of the counts they faced. Uribe pleaded guilty and testified as a prosecution witness against Menendez.
Menendez – who also pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included bribery, acting as an unregistered foreign agent and obstructing justice – did not testify during the trial.
But he had insisted publicly he was only doing his job as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reporting from outside the court in New York on Tuesday afternoon after the verdict was delivered, Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey said Menendez’s lawyers also tried to paint the senator’s wife, Nadine, as the culprit during the trial.
“But the prosecution laid out a very detailed case over those nine weeks showing that Menendez not only was involved in this, but knew what was going on,” Saloomey said.
Calls to resign
Menendez’s conviction comes four months before November’s US election and potentially dooms any hope the longtime politician had of campaigning for re-election as an independent candidate.
Immediately after Tuesday’s guilty verdict was announced, progressive activists and lawmakers from Menendez’s own Democratic Party called on him to resign.
The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said on social media that “there is no room in the Senate for a convicted felon, especially not one convicted of taking bribes”.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also said on X that Menendez should “do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign”.
That was echoed by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, who said in a statement that Menendez had “violated the trust of his constituents and betrayed his oath of office”.
“I reiterate my call for Senator Menendez to resign immediately,” Murphy said. “If he refuses to vacate his office, I call on the US Senate to vote to expel him.”
Today’s verdict finding Senator Bob Menendez guilty on 16 counts demonstrates that the Senator broke the law, violated the trust of his constituents, and betrayed his oath of office.
In America, everyone – no matter how powerful – is accountable to our laws. pic.twitter.com/ljJrQFB2eu
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) July 16, 2024
Menendez resigned as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee upon being charged last September, but has resisted calls to step down.
In a 2022 raid on the New Jersey home where Menendez lived with his wife, FBI agents confiscated gold bars worth nearly $150,000 and more than $480,000 in cash, some of it stuffed into boots and jackets emblazoned with the senator’s name.
Menendez’s wife also has been charged, although her trial has been postponed while she recovers from breast cancer surgery.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Sidney Stein set Menendez’s sentencing for October 29, a week before the election on November 5.
The senator faces the possibility of a lengthy prison term: Of the 16 counts on which he was convicted, the most serious carry a potential sentence of 20 years.