Former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) will be sentenced next month as planned after a failed bid to postpone his sentencing.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein denied Menendez’s request Monday to push back his scheduled Jan. 29, 2025, sentencing until his wife, Nadine Menendez, is through with her trial on similar charges. In their bid to move the date, Bob Menendez’s legal team argued that the jury hearing Nadine Menendez’s case should not be influenced by the outcome of her husband’s trial.
“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 Bob Menendez’s lawyer, Adam Fee.
“Put simply, the current timeline poses an unnecessary and overwhelming risk of poisoning the proceedings against Nadine,” argued Fee.
As a result of Stein’s decision, Bob Menendez will be sentenced on Jan. 29. Earlier this year, the former senator was found guilty on corruption charges related to his acceptance of bribes and acting as a foreign agent to Egypt. Bob Menendez, 70, faces up to 222 years in prison. He resigned from Congress in July after being found guilty.
Nadine Menendez’s attorney separately argued that the sentencing should take place before or after her trial.
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“Sentencing of a former United States Senator likely would engender such a flash of intense publicity that it likely would be known to virtually every prospective juror in our case, and would be a recent memory,” wrote lawyer Barry Coburn.
Nadine Menendez’s trial will now begin Feb. 5 as a result of the request. Her trial was previously pushed back due to a breast cancer diagnosis. She had pleaded not guilty.
