Judge grants former Sen. Bob Menendez prison surrender delay to attend stepdaughter's wedding

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold and cash offered as bribes, is getting 11 more days of freedom.

A federal judge agreed to push back the date Menendez was scheduled to report to prison. In a Lower Manhattan courtroom on Friday, the judge agreed to delay the ex-senator’s surrender from June 6 until June 17.

Menendez had requested a delay in order to attend the wedding of his stepdaughter, which is reportedly scheduled for early next month.

The Democrat resigned last year after becoming one of only a handful of U.S. senators ever convicted while in office. Menendez was convicted of taking bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in return for a variety of favors, including using his influence to help some of them in their dealings with foreign governments. The senator was convicted of acting as a foreign agent for the Egyptian government.

The filing of charges against Bob Menendez in fall 2023 forced him to surrender his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He resigned as a senator after his conviction.

Throughout the senator’s two-month trial, Nadine Menendez was mentioned repeatedly for her dealings with the businessmen. One of them testified that he bought Nadine Menendez a luxury car after the senator tried to get New Jersey prosecutors to drop a criminal investigation involving one of his associates.

In 2022, FBI agents raided the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home where the couple lived, discovering over $100,000 in gold bars and more than $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes in shoe boxes, jackets and boots.

The then-senator maintained during his trial that the gold bars belonged to his wife and that the cash resulted from his habit of hoarding money because his parents fled Cuba in 1951 with only the cash they had hidden in a grandfather clock.