The wife of disgraced ex-New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is set to go on trial next month after a judge denied her request to postpone her corruption case for the second time.
Manhattan federal Judge Sidney Stein on Friday denied Nadine Menendez’ request to delay her Feb. 5 trial by several months.
Lawyers for Menendez had argued the case should be pushed off because of how close the date was to her husband’s sentencing.
The attorneys filed papers asking for the delay last week on the grounds that media coverage of Bob Menendez’s Jan. 29 sentencing could cause his wife to receive an unfair trial — given how close in time the dates for the two cases are.
Potential jurors in her case could be influenced by what they see and hear about the penalty that Menendez receives — since he is likely to get hard jail time at the hearing that is expected to be highly publicized, her lawyers argued.
Nadine Menendez appeared by video in court Friday where Stein shot down the last-minute postponement.
The judge had previously granted a shorter delay for the trial start on the same grounds. Nadine had initially been set to go on trial just over a week before her husband’s sentencing, but received a several-week delay.
Nadine, 58, and Menendez, 71, were charged with accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including in the form of gold bars, stacks of cash and a Mercedes convertible.
In exchange, the Garden State Democrat used his position as the chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee to dole out favors for the governments of Qatar and Egypt. He also advanced the interests of three businessmen, the feds said.
Nadine’s case was split off from her husband’s and delayed for months at a time after she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.
Meanwhile, the three-term senator was convicted in July on all counts at trial and faces decades in prison.
It would likely be several months before the ex-senator was ordered to surrender to prison. He’s said he plans to support his wife at trial.
Last week, federal prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Menendez to at least 15 years in jail while the ex-pol asked for leniency and requested he only receive 27-months behind bars.
Menendez resigned in August following his conviction.
He faced a prior, unrelated corruption case in New Jersey that ended in mistrial in 2017.
Nadine’s lawyer, Barry Coburn, declined to comment Monday.
