Somewhere between the foul rot of Jersey political backrooms and the gold-draped vanity of Egyptian espionage, disgraced former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez now finds himself headed not for the diplomatic dais, but for a federal prison cell, as the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday unceremoniously shoved his desperate bid for bail into the shredder of judicial contempt.
The ruling came in a single, wordless slap—an unfeeling 2-1 decision that left Menendez choking on his last sliver of liberty, much like a seagull swallowing a bar of bullion.
And oh, the irony! A man who once chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, now officially the first public official in U.S. history convicted of acting as a foreign agent while still on the taxpayer’s dime.
Not just any foreign agent, mind you, but a willing servant of Egyptian military interests.
This is a man who allegedly stashed nearly half a million dollars in his own wardrobe like a crooked doomsday prepper hoarding apocalypse currency—bundles of green rubber-banded into boots and jackets stitched with his own name, like some grotesque parody of statecraft.
Eleven years. That’s what the system handed him. Eleven years for bribes in cash, gold bars, and—because irony never sleeps—a luxury Mercedes convertible.
Bribes from businessmen so brazen they might as well have worn flashing neon signs reading Black Market Political Favors Here.
As the prison gates creak open for Menendez on Tuesday, don’t expect a weeping goodbye from Capitol Hill.
Newly minted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill supported Gold Bar Bob as his running mate in 2018, while Menendez and Sherrill take contributions from the same right-wing millionaires and billionaires who are the real enemy of the working-class people in this country.
His allies are already pawing at the ankles of Donald Trump, licking boots and whispering for clemency from a man who’s made “weaponization” of justice his rallying cry.
Indeed, Menendez has taken a page right from the MAGA playbook, screeching on social media about political witch hunts and deep state conspiracies. He declared, in a post-ruling tantrum, that “President Trump was right.”
A breathtaking pivot from liberal mainstay to MAGA martyr.
Menendez signaled to Trump to intervene immediately after his 11-year sentence was imposed in January, tagging Trump’s Twitter account in a post the same day.
“President Trump is right,” the former chair of U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said. “This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
Ignoring for a moment that Trump is the cesspool and the system has virtually no integrity, this is no longer a Democratic scandal; it’s a psychedelic circus of bipartisan betrayal, where the elephants and donkeys have fused into a howling, gold-hungry chimera.
His wife, Nadine Menendez—equal parts socialite and silent partner in the grift—was convicted on every single count she faced, a feat that should earn her a plaque in the Federal Crime Hall of Fame.
She will be sentenced on the grimly symbolic date of September 11, having delayed her day in court on account of breast cancer surgery.
Sympathy, however, is in short supply when your luxury life has been funded by foreign interests and stuffed envelopes.
Meanwhile, Menendez’s last-gasp legal arguments have been laughably thin. A constitutional cocktail of Speech or Debate Clause immunity, shredded and served lukewarm to a panel that wasn’t drinking.
One judge, Alison Nathan—a Biden appointee—wanted to grant bail, but the majority ruled otherwise, perhaps unimpressed by the claim that stuffing your closet with bribes is somehow covered by legislative privilege.
And now, as the clock ticks toward Tuesday, Menendez has only two cards left to play: a Hail Mary to the Supreme Court and the hope that Trump, enthroned or not, might swoop in to pardon him with the flair of a reality TV messiah.
It is an American tragedy of Shakespearean excess: the fall of a man who believed himself too clever, too powerful, too entrenched to fall. But fall he did, face-first into the American penal system—dragging down whatever shreds of credibility still clung to the notion of clean government.
The era of Bob Menendez ends not with a gavel but with the cold clang of prison bars. And that, dear reader, is the state of the Union.