New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who was found hiding over $100,000 in gold bars during a federal raid at his home, has told his pals he will resign from his seat after being convicted of bribery earlier this week, NBC News reported Wednesday.
Menendez, who is the first sitting member of Congress convicted of acting as a foreign agent, faces 36 years behind bars.
Facing calls to resign for the better part of a year, Menendez finally relinquished on Wednesday, a day after he was found guilty on federal corruption charges. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and dozens of Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and fellow New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, have called for his ouster from Congress, and have threatened him with expulsion should he not comply voluntarily.
Menendez seemed to relent in the wake of the guilty verdict, according to NBC News, which reported the senator was calling key allies to inform them of his intention to resign, ending his three-decade-plus career in Congress.
One person Menendez is likely to call is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who released a statement following Menendez’s guilty verdict requesting his resignation. “In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” the statement read.
In September, Schumer announced Menendez would step down as chairman of the Foreign Relations panel “until the matter has been resolved,” but had not yet at the time called for his resignation.
Menendez was convicted on Tuesday on 16 federal corruption charges. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars, Menendez wielded his power to help the governments of Egypt and Qatar and benefit three New Jersey businessmen. Menendez and his wife Nadine Arslanian were also found to have received several opulent gifts, including “payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle and other items of value” in addition to the cash and gold bars, prosecutors said.
Murphy, who first called for Menendez’s resignation in September after his home was raided and over $480,000 in cash-stuffed envelopes were found in jackets bearing Menendez’s name, will appoint a senator in the interim to finish Menendez’s term which ends in January next year. Investigators also found a search looking up the value of a “kilo of gold” in Menendez’s Google search history and also found the DNA of one of the men prosecutors say bribed Menendez on one of the envelopes.
During his speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, Representative Matt Gaetz joked, “Inflation has gotten so bad, you can no longer bribe Democratic senators with cash alone. You have to use gold bars so the bribes hold value.”
Menendez said he was planning on running for reelection as an independent if he were exonerated. He said the $480,000 found in his house came from years of saving and was there “for emergencies.” He argued that prosecutors were conflating what “the normal work of a congressional office” entails, and called the charges “baseless allegations.”
Menendez and his wife were charged with conspiracy to commit bribery, honest services fraud, and extortion under color of official rights in September. A superseding indictment then charged him with accepting bribes from a foreign government, alleging Menendez “provided sensitive U.S. Government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt.”
This is the second federal corruption indictment Menendez has faced. In 2015, he was indicted on charges that alleged he accepted lavish gifts from a Florida optometrist. That case ended in a mistrial after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
