On Tuesday, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey resigned because he was found guilty of federal bribery charges last month. This was after he stopped an unsuccessful independent bid to keep his highly sought-after Senate seat.
That same day, at 5 p.m. EDT, he turned in his retirement, ending a 50-year political career that made Menendez the fourth-longest-serving senator in New Jersey history.
Democrats in New Jersey’s Gov. Phil Murphy are said to have chosen George Helmy, who is the governor’s chief of staff, as the senator-designate to take the open seat. Helmy will serve until January 3, 2025, when senators return to the nation’s capital for their regular term.
In November, Rep. Andy Kim, the Democratic candidate for the Senate, will run against Curtis Bashaw, the Republican candidate, for a full six-year term to replace Menendez in the Senate.
Menendez, 70, was found guilty last month of all 16 counts related to bribery and corruption charges that were brought against him in July. A Manhattan jury found that Menendez took money and gold bars as payment and had allegedly worked as a spy for the governments of Qatar and Egypt in the Middle East.
The date set for his sentence is October 29. But he has said he plans to appeal the jury’s ruling. The jury of six men and six women in New York’s Southern District court in Manhattan found him guilty after two days of deliberation.
In a 30-page court document filed the Monday before, Menendez’s lawyers asked a New York judge to throw out the guilty verdict. They said that Menendez’s prosecution was “nothing if not unprecedented and high profile,” and that they thought all 16 convictions “must be reversed.”
“If sustained on such a surprisingly thin reed of evidence, these convictions will make terrible, dangerous law,” it says.
In late July, after being found guilty of corruption-related federal charges, Menendez told Murphy in a resignation letter that he planned to step down from the highly sought-after Senate post on August 20.
After a tough Democratic primary with Rep. Andy Kim and the state’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, Menendez dropped his independent bid for re-election on Friday. Voters and party leaders mostly ignored Menendez in the race. Murphy dropped out of the race, which meant that Kim won for sure.
Menendez is the son of Cuban immigrants. He became well-known as the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1993 to 2006, he was a member of the House of Representatives. In 2006, Gov. Jon Corzine appointed him to the Senate to fill his seat in Washington, D.C., after Corzine was elected governor in 2005.