Bob Menendez Does Not Deserve a Pardon

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2 days ago

"People talk about the Trump [Department of Justice] DOJ," Bob Menendez, the disgraced former senator from New Jersey, posted on X Friday, "but it was the Democrats who started weaponizing the Justice Dept."
The timing of that message was interesting. Menendez, a Democrat, is scheduled to report to federal prison on June 17, after a jury convicted him of accepting almost $1 million in bribes in exchange for, among other things, favors that benefited foreign governments.
The scheme was extensive. Menendez—along with his wife, Nadine—took gold bars, $480,000 in cash, and a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible from three New Jersey businessmen, who, in return, had Menendez leverage the power of his office in a litany of corrupt ways. That included helping secure hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Egypt; assisting Egyptian-American entrepreneur Wael Hana in preserving a monopoly granted to him by that same country; attempting to influence multiple criminal investigations in a way that would satisfy two of his bribers; and promoting the interests of Qatar so that New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes could lock down a multi-million dollar investment from a fund associated with the Qatari government. This list is not exhaustive.
The former senator was convicted last year on all 16 counts, which included bribery, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice, public official acting as a foreign agent, among several others. A judge sentenced him to 11 years in prison, which was, in some sense, a break, considering that the federal sentencing guidelines recommended a minimum of 24 years in prison. (His wife was convicted last month on all counts—15 in her case—and is scheduled to be sentenced in June.)
Menendez's Friday post coincides not only with his looming prison sentence but also with the spate of pardons recently granted by President Donald Trump. It's understandable why the former senator would want to pull out all the stops here. Prison, to put it mildly, sucks. Trump should still decline to indulge him.
Whether or not the president will be moved remains unclear. Among his recent pardons is Paul Walczak, an executive who was convicted of withholding millions of dollars in taxes from his employees' paychecks and then keeping the funds for himself. His pardon came shortly before he was to report to prison for an 18-month sentence—and after his mother attended a Trump fundraiser dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where, according to the invitation, admission cost $1 million. But perhaps more analogous to Menendez's situation is the pardon given to Scott Jenkins, the disgraced former Virginia sheriff who, in exchange for cash payments, gave out auxiliary deputy sheriff badges so recipients could invoke special privileges.
It is not exactly a mystery why the pardon power's reputation is in the toilet. The problem is a bipartisan one—former President Joe Biden, for his part, issued preemptive pardons for his family members, Anthony Fauci, and others, which does not exactly instill confidence in the rule of law. Neither does pardoning people who sufficiently endear themselves to the chief executive. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin captured those motivations best on X: "No MAGA left behind," he wrote Monday, as he thanked Trump for pardoning Jenkins.
But the pardon power, for all the negative attention it has received in recent months, can be an incredible tool for good. It is effectively the only lever to check overzealous prosecutors and unjust sentences in the federal system. Some of Trump's pardons make the case for this. Most famously there was Alice Marie Johnson, who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the '90s for her role as a drug mule in a cocaine ring; Trump initially commuted her sentence and later pardoned her in 2020. Listed in the latest round of pardons were John Moore and Tanner Mansell, two Florida diving instructors who were convicted of theft after freeing sharks they thought had been caught illegally—which, as Reason's Jacob Sullum notes, was a bizarre misuse of the discretion afforded to prosecutors.
That is the sort of thing clemency is for: to give a lifeline to people who may have been railroaded by the government, which sometimes gets creative and fanatical in its attempts to punish people. It is not supposed to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for well-connected, powerful people who can sufficiently flatter the president. After all, Menendez, as a senator, was one of the most powerful people in the country. His case was not an example of politicizing justice, though a pardon would be.
The post Bob Menendez Does Not Deserve a Pardon appeared first on Reason.com.