Former US senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in jail on Wednesday for selling his once-considerable influence in Washington for gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars by acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.
Mr Menendez's lawyers had tried to get him less than two years in prison, citing his decades of public service and a life largely well-lived after the son of Cuban immigrants rose from poverty to become “the epitome of the American Dream”.
The trial traced Mr Menendez’s dealings with Egyptian officials and his quest to aid three men who showered him with lucrative gifts found during a 2022 raid on the New Jersey home he shared with his wife, Nadine.
FBI agents who searched the house found $480,000 in cash, some of it stuffed inside boots and the pockets of clothing hanging in the closets of Mr Menendez and his wife, Nadine. They also seized gold bars worth an estimated $150,000.
Prosecutors said he had “put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes”, including by serving Egypt’s interests as he worked to protect a meat certification monopoly.
Among other things, Mr Menendez provided Egyptian officials with information about the staff at the US embassy in Cairo and ghost-wrote a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in military aid.
He resigned from the Senate after his conviction last year, though he lost much of his power in the autumn of 2023 when the bribery charges against him were revealed and he was forced to surrender his post as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee.
Mr Menendez has insisted that he is innocent of any crime, saying repeatedly that his interactions with Egyptian officials were normal for the head of the committee, and that he always put American interests first. He denied taking any bribes and said the gold bars belonged to his wife.
Ms Menendez faces trial in March on many of the same charges as her husband after spending the past year battling breast cancer.
Prosecutors said in a court filing that long prison terms are a warranted punishment “for this extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of the public trust".
Mr Menendez’s lawyers, in a pre-sentence submission, said he had already suffered greatly. His law licence has been suspended and will be revoked if his conviction stands. His state pension is in jeopardy.
His lawyers described a 50-year history of public service, tracing a career in which Mr Menendez was mayor, a state legislator, a member of the US House and then a senator.
Yet he also had the distinction of being the only US senator indicted twice.