Prosecutors initially requested a 15-year prison term for Menendez, who was convicted last year of multiple charges, including acting as an agent for Egypt.
“You really don’t know the man you are about to sentence,” Menendez told the judge, as reported by the Associated Press.
“Your honour, I am far from a perfect man. I have made more than my share of mistakes and bad decisions,” he added.
“I’ve done far more good than bad. I ask you, your honour, to judge me in that context.”
Menendez resigned from the Senate after his conviction last year. The focus of the case against him was a multi-layered bribery scheme involving Menendez, his wife Nadine, Egyptian-American businessman Wael Hana and a number of Egyptian officials.
Menendez and his wife had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars and mortgage payments, and in exchange, the lawmaker helped ensure Egypt was getting billions of dollars in US aid.
The prosecutors in the case also accused Menendez of being involved in another bribery scheme involving a halal certification company.
They said that Hana, who was also sentenced to prison in this case, gave Menendez’s wife $10,000 per month.
In exchange, Menendez worked to stop the US government from critically examining Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, which certified halal meat for export to the US. IS EG Halal, a New Jersey start-up, had exclusive control over the certification of halal food exports from the US to Egypt.
A $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible gifted to Nadine was part of the multifaceted corruption scheme, according to prosecutors.
A search of the Menendez home in 2022 last summer revealed $480,000 in cash, much of it stuffed into envelopes, in clothing, closets and a safe, with some of the envelopes bearing the fingerprints of Fred Daibes, one of the other defendants in the case.
Gold bars worth around $100,000 were also discovered in the house. After returning from a trip to Egypt in October 2021, Menendez reportedly googled, “How much is one kilo of gold worth?”
The former senator had “put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes”, prosecutors said, according to the Associated Press.
Menendez’s wife faces trial in March on many of the same charges as her husband.
