Menendez, Convicted of Taking Bribes, Ends Race for Re-election
The New York Times
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey instructed state officials on Friday to remove his name from the Nov. 5 ballot.
Senator Robert Menendez, a famously pugnacious Democrat 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, Mr. 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“I am advising you that I wish to have my name withdrawn from the ballot,” Mr. Menendez wrote in a one-sentence email to the New Jersey Division of Elections.
Mr. Menendez, 70, was found guilty of taking bribes and acting as an agent of Egypt after a two-month trial in Manhattan, 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 Mr. Menendez, who has lost only one campaign in his storied political career — his first race for mayor of Union City, N.J., in 1982.
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