After he was found guilty on all counts in his federal corruption trial this week, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., expressed confidence that he’ll be vindicated on appeal. At first blush, it’s tempting to cast his stated optimism as wishful thinking from someone fighting for his political and legal future.
But the Supreme Court’s decisions siding with defendants in past political corruption cases render Menendez’s legal fate an open question. While the precise appellate issues in his case will take shape once his appeal gets underway, consider some of the high court’s recent decisions in other cases.
But the Supreme Court’s decisions siding with defendants in past political corruption cases render Menendez’s legal fate an open question.
Just this term, the Republican-appointed majority curbed use of federal bribery law against state and local officials, over dissent that argued the majority was dishonoring congressional intent to punish public corruption. This term’s breakdown aside, siding with defendants in these cases has been a bipartisan effort from the justices. Last year, the court unanimously threw out fraud convictions from New York. In 2020, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the unanimous ruling doing the same for convictions stemming from the Bridgegate scandal. Likewise, the court unanimously narrowed federal corruption prosecutions in its 2016 decision siding with former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Against that backdrop, Menendez may have reason to hope that he becomes one of the next politicians to benefit from this line of jurisprudence.
But an equally notable aspect of his guilty verdicts — for bribery, fraud, acting as a foreign agent and other crimes — is that the government secured them in spite of the high bar for federal prosecutors set by the Supreme Court over the years. So this may present a political corruption conviction that even the justices let stand. But it could be years before we know the answer. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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