A federal judge today rejected Nadine Menendez’s bid to delay her prison sentence until an appeal of her conviction is complete and remains scheduled to begin her 54-month sentence on July 10.
U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein found that Menendez identified “no substantial question of law warranting her release pending appeal.”
Menendez played a considerable role in the downfall of her husband and co-conspirator, former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez. After a separate trial, a jury found Nadine Menendez guilty on 15 charges, among them bribery, obstruction of justice, and helping her husband become an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government.
Menendez was accused of facilitating the connections between her husband and his bribers, and she herself financially benefited from the transactions, most famously in her receipt of a Mercedes-Benz.
Stein also turned down Menendez’s request to stay the payment of her fines and forfeitures.
The Justice Department had opposed her bid to remain free on bail pending appeal. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has assigned her a federal prisoner number: 79613-510.
In November, the New York Times reported that Menendez had not yet visited her husband in prison. Bob Menendez began serving an eleven-year sentence for bribery and corruption on June 17.
Nadine Menendez’s trial, meanwhile, was delayed for nearly a year due to her breast cancer diagnosis. Prosecutors were able to use much of the same evidence that led to the conviction of her husband to show how she had used her husband’s Senate position for personal gain.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had asked for an eight-year prison term; Menendez, citing her youth in war-torn Lebanon and her breast cancer diagnosis, had sought one year.
At her sentencing, she told Stein that she said she was doing whatever her husband asked, and “did it blindly.”
“I put my life in his hands and he strung me like a puppet,” The New York Daily News reported Nadine Menendez said. “I now know, he’s not my savior. He’s not the man I thought he was.”