Judge won’t delay Menendez sentencing

Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez will be sentenced on January 29 on bribery and conspiracy charges after a federal judge denied his postponement request.

But U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein moved Nadine Menendez’s corruption trial to begin on February 5.  She was supposed to be tried along with her husband and co-defendant earlier this year, but Stein agreed to separate trials after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Lawyers for Menendez said the onetime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to attend his wife’s trial and had sought to postpone his sentencing until after it was over.

“In the modern age of social media and wall-to-wall news coverage, it is simply not realistic to expect that the jurors – even if instructed to avoid media coverage of the case or ‘related cases’ — could miss the news of a sentence actually being imposed on Nadine’s husband and co-defendant,” said Menendez lawyer Adam Fee.  “Put simply, the current timeline poses an unnecessary and overwhelming risk of poisoning the proceedings against Nadine.”

Menendez was convicted on sixteen counts of bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government on July 16.  He announced his resignation from the Senate on July 23 and left office on August 20.

His original sentencing was October 29.  Menendez, who turns 71 tomorrow, faces up to 222 years in prison, but it’s unlikely that Stein will order the maximum sentence on each count.

Menendez is the second U.S. Senator from New Jersey convicted on federal corruption charges.  Harrison Williams, a four-term Democrat, was convicted on May 1, 1981, of accepting and agreeing to a $12.6 million bribery scheme from an FBI agent posing as an Arab sheik in 1981 as part of the Abscam scandal.  He was sentenced to three years in prison on February 17, 1982, and resigned on March 11, after the fifth day of his expulsion trial.