Facing 15 Year Prison Sentence, Ex-Senator Menendez Will Not Get New Corruption Trial

Former Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez will not be getting a new, corruption trial and faces sentencing on January 29th, with federal prosecutors seeking a 15 year prison sentence for the former head of the powerful, Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Menendez still holds fleeting hope of a pardon from Republican President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Manhattan federal court Judge Sidney Stein ruled that the former, three-term Senator was not unfairly convicted despite an evidence error during his trial’s jury deliberations.  In November, Menendez had asked the judge to throw out his corruption conviction after prosecutors learned they had they accidentally provided jurors with pieces of evidence they weren’t supposed to see.

Federal prosecutors inadvertently had loaded incorrect versions of trial exhibits, that weren’t properly redacted, when they sent a laptop loaded with evidence to the jury for their review when the jurors were weighing Menendez’s verdict.

In her Wednesday ruling, Judge Stein stated, it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that jurors had ever seen the mistakenly included evidence.   She said the evidence was “a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence.”

The judge wrote in her decision that the jurors had a “infinitesimal chance” of seeing the evidence, adding that “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.”

Menendez reportedly sought a pardon from President Joe Biden before he left office.  Now he’s hoping that President Trump will grant him clemency, a scenario which seems highly unlikely considering that Menendez voted to impeach Trump during both of his trials.

Menendez said on Wednesday, after Judge Stein’s ruling, he planned to appeal.