Prosecutors say former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez needs to be imprisoned for 15 years, after the Democrat from New Jersey grew to become the primary to be convicted of abusing a Senate committee management place and the primary public official to be convicted of serving as a international agent.
In papers filed late Thursday in Manhattan federal courtroom, prosecutors known as for the prolonged jail time period for the 71-year-old Menendez when he’s sentenced on Jan. 29.
Menendez was convicted in July of 16 corruption expenses introduced after an FBI raid on his residence in 2022 turned up $150,000 in gold bars and $480,000 in money, a lot of which prosecutors alleged was the results of bribes paid by three New Jersey businessmen who wished the senator to make use of his energy to guard their pursuits and make them cash.
When he was charged in fall 2023, Menendez was chairman of the Senate International Relations Committee. He was pressured out of that place in 2023 and gave up his Senate seat in August.
In presentence arguments final week, protection legal professionals known as for Choose Sidney H. Stein to be lenient with Menendez, saying his conviction had “rendered him a nationwide punchline and stripped him of each conceivable private, skilled, and monetary profit.”
“Bob is deserving of mercy due to the penalties already imposed, his age, and the dearth of a compelling must impose a custodial sentence,” the legal professionals mentioned.
Two businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, had been additionally convicted together with Menendez whereas a 3rd pleaded responsible and testified on the July trial. Prosecutors known as for Hana to obtain at the least 10 years in jail and Daibes to spend at the least 9 years behind bars. Prosecutors mentioned the crimes occurred from 2018 to 2022.
Of their submission, prosecutors known as the case a “historical rarity” as a result of Menendez abused his highly effective put up on the Senate International Relations Committee and since he acted as an agent of Egypt.
“The defendants’ crimes amount to an extraordinary attempt, at the highest levels of the Legislative Branch, to corrupt the nation’s core sovereign powers over foreign relations and law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote.
“He corruptly promised to influence foreign relations, including attempting to pressure a federal agency engaged in diplomatic attempts to protect U.S. businesses from an extractive monopoly granted by a foreign nation to one of his coconspirators. And he corruptly promised to subvert the rule of law by disrupting multiple felony criminal proceedings, state and federal, including by influencing the selection of the chief federal law enforcement officer for New Jersey,” they added.
With Menendez’s assist, Hana was granted the only real proper to certify that meat exported to Egypt from america conformed to Islamic dietary necessities.
The monopoly that Hana’s firm acquired pressured out a number of different firms that had been certifying beef and liver exported to Egypt and occurred over a span of a number of days in Might 2019, in keeping with trial testimony.
