Menendez ends race for re-election after conviction for taking bribes

Sen. Bob Menendez, a famously pugnacious Democrat from New Jersey whose five-decade political career came to a crashing halt last month when he was convicted of corruption, has run his final race for re-election.

After resisting what felt all-but inevitable to people close to the senator, Menendez pulled his name from November’s ballot hours before the Friday deadline. He had planned to run as an independent.

“I am advising you that I wish to have my name withdrawn from the ballot,” Menendez wrote in a one-sentence email to the New Jersey Division of Elections.

Menendez, 70, was found guilty of taking bribes and acting as an agent of Egypt after a two-month trial in New York City, and he had virtually no chance of winning re-election.

He had not mounted a campaign and is reliant on his shrinking election war chest to pay lawyers as he prepares to appeal his conviction on 16 criminal counts. He has also dipped into his campaign funds to pay lawyers representing his wife, Nadine Menendez, who is awaiting trial on charges that she traded her husband’s political influence for cash, gold and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.

But until Friday it was unclear whether voters might get one more chance to cast a vote for Menendez, who has lost only one campaign in his storied political career – his first race for mayor of Union City, New Jersey, in 1982.

Menendez did not compete in the Democratic primary in June, but he did file three times the requisite number of signatures needed to lock in a spot on the ballot in November. He had until the end of Friday to pull his name off the ballot.

Had he opted against bowing out, he would have faced off against Curtis Bashaw, a Republican hotel developer, and Rep. Andy Kim, a third-term member of Congress who won the Democratic primary with 75% of the vote and is heavily favored to win in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in New Jersey by nearly 1 million registered voters, and it has been more than 50 years since the state elected a Republican senator.

Kim, 42, said he doubted that Menendez would have had a meaningful effect on the race results.

“I’m not particularly concerned,” Kim said after a campaign event in Maywood, New Jersey, just before Menendez’s letter was filed. “It’s not keeping me up at night.”

Menendez can continue to use his remaining $3.3 million in campaign funds to pay legal fees even though he is no longer running for office. But he is now precluded from accepting additional campaign contributions, which had tapered off drastically since he was indicted in September. He took in just $731.50 from mid-May through the end of June, according to his most recent Federal Election Commission filing.

There was more activity in a defense fund he had established to help pay his legal fees. Twenty-one donors contributed a total of $127,500 between April and July, federal records show. He can legally continue to accept donations to the defense fund, regardless of his status as a candidate.

Menendez’s legal woes have proved to be a source of significant embarrassment for Democrats struggling to hold on to the White House and retain their narrow margin in the Senate.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, refrained from calling for Menendez’s resignation until after his conviction. On Friday, a spokesperson for Schumer had no immediate comment on Menendez’s decision to abandon his race for re-election.

Bashaw, the Republican hoping to replace Menendez in Washington, said it was “time to move on with this election and make it a clean, straightforward race focusing on the issues facing our state.”

Nadine Menendez’s trial has been delayed while she is being treated for breast cancer.

Friday was also the deadline for her lawyers to provide Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court with additional medical records that may be used to determine when Nadine Menendez, 57, might be ready to stand trial.

As of late Friday afternoon, there was no record that her lawyer, Barry Coburn, had filed the requested documents, which are likely to be sealed from public view to safeguard Nadine Menendez’s medical privacy. Coburn said he had no comment.

Bob Menendez, his two co-defendants and a disgraced insurance broker who pleaded guilty and testified against the senator during the trial are all scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 29. Each faces decades in prison.

A week after his conviction, Menendez said he would step down from his Senate seat at the end of the day Aug. 20.

Earlier Friday, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey announced that he had selected George Helmy, his former chief of staff, to replace Menendez in the Senate through the Nov. 5 election.

After the election, Helmy, 44, will step down and the governor will appoint the winner of the Senate race to the seat, roughly two months early.

Kim said he supported the governor’s plan to keep Helmy in the temporary role only until voters had decided who will represent New Jersey in the Senate for the next six years.

“You should want to try to keep that as short as possible,” Kim said, “and if you have the opportunity to have a duly elected person come in – I think that’s good.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.