Former Sen. Bob Menendez starts prison term in corruption case

Ryan Tarinelli, CQ-Roll Call on Jun 17, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Bob Menendez surrendered to a federal prison in Pennsylvania to start an 11-year sentence Tuesday morning, after his conviction last year in a sweeping corruption case that spurred the downfall of the once-powerful New Jersey Democrat.

A federal jury last year found Menendez, 71, guilty on a range of criminal charges, including bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent. A judge sentenced him earlier this year, saying at the hearing that somewhere along the way the lawmaker became “a corrupt politician.”

The federal Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday confirmed that Menendez was in the agency’s custody at FCI Schuylkill, a medium-security federal correctional institution in rural Pennsylvania that has an adjacent minimum-security satellite prison camp, according to the BOP’s website.

The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been scheduled to report to prison earlier this month, but a judge approved a request for an extension to allow for Menendez to attend his step-daughter’s wedding.

His attorneys have argued that a lengthy prison sentence could be a “death sentence” for Menendez, who has appealed his convictions.

Prosecutors have described Menendez’s conduct as historic. It’s the first case where a U.S. senator was found guilty of a crime involving the abuse of a Senate committee leadership position, and the first in which a senator was found guilty of serving as a foreign agent while working as a public official, they said.

Menendez, in exchange for bribes, promised to approve military aid to Egypt, to pressure the New Jersey attorney general to disrupt a criminal probe and to recommend someone for a U.S. attorney post who he thought he could influence to affect a federal case against a real estate developer, prosecutors said.

During last year’s federal trial, an FBI agent testified that authorities seized gold bars and about $486,000 in cash during a 2022 search of the New Jersey residence the senator shared with his wife. The jury rejected defense arguments that there were other reasons for the cash stockpile and gold bars.

In April, a federal jury in New York found the senator’s wife guilty on charges in the corruption case. Her sentencing is set for later this year.

Menendez has shown signs of angling for a pardon from President Donald Trump. After his sentencing in January, Menendez maintained his innocence and said the whole process was “nothing but a political witch hunt.”

“Welcome to the Southern District of New York: The Wild West of political prosecutions. President Trump is right. This process is political and it’s corrupted to the core,” Menendez said at the time. “I hope President Trump cleans up [the] cesspool and restores the integrity to the system,” he added.

Menendez also posted on social media in the lead up to his surrender date, using an account with the name “Senator Bob Menendez,” even though he resigned after the conviction. In one post, he accused prosecutors of “loading unconstitutional evidence onto a laptop they gave to the jury.”

“The illegal evidence, that the Judge had ruled inadmissible, violated the Congressional immunity clause of the Constitution,” Menendez argued.

Menendez’s surrender comes after an appellate court last week denied his push for bail pending appeal.

In court documents, attorneys for Menendez had argued that the trial was “marred by a conceded violation of the Speech or Debate Clause.”

“The government provided the jury with evidence that had been excluded as constitutionally forbidden — evidence the government described as ‘very critical,’ ‘highly probative,’ and ‘compelling,’” Menendez’s legal team wrote in a brief.