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.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.