Menendez wants to delay prison to attend step-daughter’s wedding

Update: on May 9, Judge Sidney Stein agreed to move Menendez’s prison surrender date from June 6 to June 17, though he said that “no further adjournments will be granted.”

Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez wants to put off prison for an extra eleven days so he can attend the wedding of his step-daughter in Massachusetts next month.

Menendez was convicted last July on sixteen counts of bribery and corruption charges, and was sentenced to eleven years in a federal prison.  He was due to report to FCI Schuylkill in Pennsylvania on June 6.

Attorneys Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman said in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein that Menendez’s wife and co-defendant, Nadine, will face another surgery – she has battled breast cancer – and has trouble traveling alone.

“Allowing Senator Menendez to accompany his wife to their daughter’s wedding would alleviate this hardship and permit the family to be together for a meaningful — and perhaps final — gathering before the commencement of Senator Menendez’s lengthy custodial sentence,” they said.  “Compassion weighs strongly in favor of permitting Senator Menendez a brief extension of his surrender date to accompany Nadine to the wedding.”

They are seeking permission to add time for the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman to return to New Jersey and then travel to Pennsylvania to surrender to federal custody.

After a separate trial, Nadine Menendez was convicted last month and faces a prison sentence.  Her attorneys have asked Stein to postpone her sentencing for three months — from June 12 to September 11 – to obtain sentencing-related reports from two professionals.   Details of her impending surgery were not made publicly available.

FCI Schuylkill is a medium security federal prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Minersville, Pennsylvania, about two-and-a-half hours from his home in Englewood Cliffs and about 50 miles west of Allentown.

He has been assigned a prisoner number: 67277-050.