Disgraced New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez — who was convicted on 16 counts including bribery, extortion, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent — lost his bid for a new trial Wednesday.
But the convicted Democrat is hoping to avoid serious jail time by begging President Donald Trump for clemency.
Disgraced ex-NJ Sen. Bob Menendez won’t get a new corruption trial — and holds out hope for Trump pardon https://t.co/ZAVIQsx26g pic.twitter.com/RfxzFqam1m
— New York Post (@nypost) January 22, 2025
Menendez, 71, sought a pardon from former President Joe Biden before he left office but was apparently rebuffed.
Now, the disgraced Senator has been reportedly seeking clemency from Trump — who may be reluctant to grant the request given Menendez voted against him during both of the president’s impeachment trials, according to reports from the New York Post.
Menendez currently awaits a Jan. 29 sentencing, and reports from his camp are confident that Trump will deliver mercy, especially if he asks for a sentence commutation instead of a full pardon, according to NBC News sources.
Menendez faces up to 15 years in federal prison for his “naked greed” in accepting a “hoard of bribes” — including gold bars, cash and gifts, prosecutors said earlier this month.
The Democrat was convicted in July of accepting bribes in exchange for advancing the interests of three Garden State businessmen and the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
To complicate matters for Menendez, Manhattan federal court Judge Sidney Stein found that the three-term Democrat wasn’t unfairly convicted despite an evidence issue during jury deliberations.
Last November, Menendez asked Stein to throw out his conviction after prosecutors discovered they accidentally provided jurors with bits of evidence they weren’t supposed to see.
Prosecutors had loaded the wrong versions of trial exhibits, that weren’t properly redacted, when they sent a laptop loaded with evidence to the jury to review as the panel weighed Menendez’s verdict, according to a New York Post report.
Stein, in a ruling Wednesday, found it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that jurors ever saw the mistakenly included evidence — “a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence.”
Even on the “infinitesimal chance” that the jury did see that evidence, “there is a similarly minuscule likelihood that the jury would have understood it, much less attribute the significance to these exhibits that the defense now do,” the judge wrote in a rubuttal.
Menendez said in a statement Wednesday that he “respectfully disagree[s]” with Stein’s decision and that he planned to appeal over the evidence blunder.
“To think that prosecutors can put unconstitutional and inadmissible evidence in front of the jury, assure the defense they only provided the jury with admitted exhibits, and escape any consequences, is outrageous,” Menendez said.