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Recently, the former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez was ordered to serve eleven years in prison for accepting bribes in cash and gold worth more than half a million dollars. He is the first person sentenced to prison for crimes committed in the Senate in more than forty years. Menendez did favors for the government of Egypt while he was the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and intervened in criminal cases against the businessmen who were bribing him. In New York, he broke down in tears before a federal judge, pleading for leniency. Upon emerging from the courtroom, he made a thinly veiled plea to the man he had once voted to impeach. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared to news cameras. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”
WNYC’s New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon explores how Menendez, the son of working-class immigrants from Cuba, scaled the heights of American politics, and then fell dramatically. But will he serve the time? Solomon speaks with the constitutional-law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who says, “It’s hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat. . . . [Trump] seems much more interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.”
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
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