Inside the downfall of a senator who operated in ‘shades of gray’

Over the years, Bob Menendez gained a reputation as New Jersey’s ultimate political survivor. On Tuesday, his endurance ran out.

The conviction of the Democratic senator on 16 counts in a sweeping bribery case comes nearly seven years after he beat prior corruption charges thanks to a hung jury — and 18 years after another federal investigation ended without charges.

When Menendez walked out of court following his 2017 mistrial, he ominously warned the Democrats who were “digging my political grave” that he would not forget them. On Tuesday, he vowed to keep fighting for his freedom, declaring “the law and the facts did not sustain” his conviction. He’s already running for reelection as an independent.

But this isn’t 2017. Menendez’s political career has been dead and buried since his indictment in September, when his party abandoned him and Rep. Andy Kim launched a winning primary bid to replace Menendez. In the ensuing months, New Jersey’s political system effectively collapsed, with Democrats upending the way they’ve done business in the state for decades. Just last month, a state grand jury indicted New Jersey’s most powerful Democratic political boss, George Norcross, on charges he led a different corruption scheme.

Now Menendez, who has virtually no chance of winning reelection as an independent in the deep-blue state, is staring at the ruins of a 50-year political career and the prospect of decades in prison.

It was a spectacular downfall that, despite the two-month-long trial and mountains of damning evidence, still evinced a measure of shock from New Jersey politicos used to seeing the senator survive federal investigations and prosecutions — all while accumulating power in the Senate and gaining a reputation as a policy wonk.

Menendez, the 70-year-old son of working-class Cuban immigrants, wasn’t always loved by all of his fellow New Jersey Democrats. But his political acumen was universally respected — and feared. His influence peaked as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a position he held while taking bribes in exchange for favors to benefit the governments of Egypt and Qatar.

“For his entire career, he’s operated in shades of gray closer to black,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, a Democratic candidate for governor in 2025. “Every step of the way he’s operated in a questionable manner while at the same time being extremely well-versed in policy, very smart in his politics, and at the same time having a natural base in the Latino community.”

Even Fulop — who began his political career in 2004 with a hopeless primary campaign against Menendez, then a member of the House — credited the senator with getting important things done for New Jersey, like advocating for a light rail that “transformed” public transit in his home base of Hudson County, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Julie Roginsky, a Democratic consultant, said Menendez’s downfall is tragic considering his record and what he represented to many.

“I don’t know if disbelief is the word. It’s tremendous sadness,” Roginsky said of the conviction. “He’s an incredibly effective senator, a trailblazer for the Latino community, and a throwback to the days when somebody attained the highest offices in the state by climbing their way up the ladder and not by purchasing a seat.”

For decades, Menendez instilled a mix of reverence and fear in fellow Democrats.

During that 2017 corruption trial in Newark, prominent Democrat after prominent Democrat showed up to court to watch the proceedings, signaling their support for the senator, who appeared to take account of the few who didn’t show. Even a bipartisan duo of Senate colleagues, New Jersey’s Cory Booker and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, took the stand as character witnesses.

The latest case against him was a stark contrast. Elected officials avoided Menendez’s first public appearance following his September indictment and didn’t attend his trial in lower Manhattan.

Nevertheless, the stench of corruption around Menendez wasn’t enough to derail the career of his son, Rep. Rob Menendez, whose 2022 political rise from relative obscurity was engineered by his father. Most of New Jersey’s Democratic establishment stuck with the younger Menendez in his successful primary reelection run against Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla.

Reformer to defendant

Menendez was shaped by New Jersey’s boss-driven political system much the way he would later shape it.

“He’s a guy who grew up in a corrupt system and figured out how to navigate it, and it eventually caught up with him. I think that’s what his legacy is going to be,” said Chris Russell, a Republican consultant who worked on the 2018 campaign against Menendez.

Born to blue-collar Cuban immigrants who fled during the Fulgencio Batista regime, Menendez was raised in a tenement in Union City, a one-square mile, extremely densely populated municipality with a big Hispanic population.

His first campaign was 50 years ago: For Union City school board, when he was a protege of the city’s mayor and powerful political boss, William Musto. Later, after being appointed board secretary, Menendez, alleging corruption, broke with Musto and would later testify at his benefactor’s corruption trial in 1982. He donned a bulletproof vest — a tale he would tell throughout his political rise to boost his credibility as a reformer.

Menendez was elected mayor of Union City in 1986, a position he continued to hold after he was elected to the state Assembly and then the state Senate. He won a seat in the U.S. House in 1992 and became a statewide figure with his appointment to the Senate by Gov. Jon Corzine at the beginning of 2006.

Corruption allegations and rumors soon haunted Menendez. During his campaign for a full first term, then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie subpoenaed records related to Menendez and a nonprofit, North Hudson Community Action Corp., that over a nine-year period paid the senator about $300,000 to rent office space in a Union City house he owned. Menendez, as a House member, had helped the nonprofit secure federal grants.

Menendez won a full term during the 2006 Democratic wave and the investigation died down, with many Democrats arguing Christie had gone after Menendez to boost his own political career or to please the Bush administration. A year before his 2012 reelection campaign, Menendez showed off a clearance letter from federal prosecutors stating that the case was formally closed. But just a year later, federal prosecutors began looking at Menendez again, this time regarding his relationship with wealthy Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen.

Menendez’s first indictment dropped in 2015. Prosecutors accused him of blocking a U.S. donation of security screening equipment to the Dominican Republic to benefit a company owned by Melgen, and interceding on Melgen’s behalf on a multimillion-dollar Medicare dispute, among other things. Melgen, they alleged, in turn provided Menendez with millions of dollars in campaign contributions, private jet flights and Dominican villa stays.

Menendez never disputed that he did favors for Melgen. But his legal team successfully argued in court that the favors were not in exchange for gifts, but out of friendship. The jury deadlocked on all counts, with most favoring acquittal. The judge declared a mistrial.

Still, the case hurt Menendez — never spectacularly popular with voters in New Jersey — in the polls, and it ended just a year before his 2018 reelection campaign. But, once again, it was a Democratic wave year, and Menendez managed an 11-point victory over Republican opponent Bob Hugin, who put tens of millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign.

The close call did not cow the senator. In their 2023 indictment, prosecutors in this latest case charged that Menendez and his wife, Nadine — a codefendant whose trial has been delayed due to her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment — began hatching a scheme in 2018 to accept bribes. In exchange, prosecutors alleged, they did favors for two other co-defendants, one with ties to the Egyptian government, and a cooperating witness.

“The arrogance went to his head. He thought he was so powerful and so important that he believed his own PR,” said Hugin, who also grew up in Union City and knew Menendez when the two served as student representatives on its school board. Hugin now chairs the New Jersey Republican State Committee.

What’s next

Senate Democrats have yet to say whether they’ll seek to expel Menendez but had resisted calls to do so before his conviction. Shortly after the jury read the verdict, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Menendez to resign, joining more than half of Senate Democrats who had already done so. At least one Democratic senator is considering a push to expel Menendez.

“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday also called for Menendez to resign and, barring that, said the Senate should expel him. Murphy said he would appoint a temporary replacement for the seat. If he chooses Kim, who beat Murphy’s wife in the primary, that would give the senator a bump in seniority should he win the November election.

The conviction news could actually be construed as positive for New Jersey Democrats, since it makes a Menendez independent bid harder to gain traction at Kim’s expense. Kim is facing wealthy Republican hotelier Curtis Bashaw, a moderate, in November.

“Every percent he gets is coming from an Andy Kim voter. In a close race, he could do a lot of damage,” Fulop said.

There’s also speculation that Menendez could stay in the race to damage Democrats in an attempt to gain clemency from Donald Trump should he win in November. Trump called Menendez’s prosecution an “attack,” commuted the prison sentence of Melgen, Menendez’s former co-defendant, and it was during his administration that the Department of Justice chose not to retry Menendez after his prior mistrial.

“I think anyone who got convicted would be looking for clemency. I think he’s also going to be looking for revenge,” Russell said. “That’s a hallmark of Bob Menendez, to exact revenge on people who wronged him. This time he thinks he’s got a whole party of people who wronged him.”