Sen. Bob Menendez is still fighting.
The embattled New Jersey senator filed paperwork Monday to run a long-shot campaign as an independent in the November Senate race.
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The filing came a day before the state’s primary election, and as Menendez remains on trial in Manhattan on federal fraud and bribery charges.
Filing signatures opened the door to a run, but Menendez has until mid-August to withdraw from the November ballot. The criminal trial, which could send Menendez to jail for years if he is convicted, is expected to continue through the end of June.
Even if Menendez is acquitted, the chances he remains in the Senate are slim, given low approval ratings, calls from most of his colleagues in the Senate to resign, and the years of scandal that have surrounded him. Menendez has served in the Senate as a Democrat since 2006 but opted not to enter the Democratic primary this year as he faced trial.
“He’s a very proud man and it may be that withdrawal would be interpreted as fleeing from the fight,” Senate historian and former Senate staffer Ross Baker said. “On the other hand, his chances are not very auspicious and there’s another argument to be made that rather than suffer electoral humiliation, he just won’t run.”
U.S. Rep. Andy Kim is expected to win the Democratic primary Tuesday against two lesser-known Democratic candidates. The race began as a heated battle between Kim and the state’s first lady Tammy Murphy, who withdrew in March. Curtis Bashaw and Christine Serrano-Glassner are vying for the GOP Senate nomination in New Jersey, which has not elected a Republican to the Senate in more than 50 years.
While Kim is favored to win in November due to the state’s majority-Democratic electorate, Menendez’s presence on the ballot could act as a spoiler for Kim and put the Senate seat in play for the first time in years. That would, however, require him to perform extremely well as a third-party candidate.
He filed 2,465 signatures Monday, many more than the 800 required to get on the ballot.
A history of legal challenges
Menendez’s potential independent run would be his steepest political comeback attempt in a career that has involved other corruption allegations over the years.
» READ MORE: From gold bars to a pricey car: All the bribes Sen. Bob Menendez has been accused of accepting over the years
He spent the day in a Manhattan courtroom Monday, on trial in the second federal corruption case lodged against him in less than a decade.
Federal prosecutors in New York indicted the senator and his wife, Nadine Arslanian, in September on charges they accepted bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from three New Jersey businessmen who sought favors from the senator.
That case comes less than six years after Menendez faced the threat of conviction in another bribery case alleging that he accepted lavish gifts, flights on private jets, and campaign support from a Florida eye doctor who was also seeking Menendez’s muscle on matters that would benefit his business.
A jury weighing those charges deadlocked in 2017, and the judge later acquitted Menendez of some charges before prosecutors opted not to retry the case.
Defense lawyers maintained Menendez and the doctor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, had been close friends for decades and accused the government of attempting to criminalize gift-giving.
“Is there, in this case, a duffel bag stuffed with cash somewhere?” the doctor’s attorney asked jurors in closing arguments in that case. “No, there’s none of that.”
But as the FBI raided Menendez’s Englewood Cliffs home in June 2022 while investigating their current case against the senator, they found exactly that — a black duffel bag filled with more than $130,000 in cash.
Prosecutors say that was only one of the bribes Menendez and Arslanian received from their benefactors — a list that also includes envelopes stuffed with cash, gold bars, and a Mercedes.
Since his latest trial began about three weeks ago, government lawyers have sought to link those gifts to actions taken by Menendez that advanced his benefactors’ interests, including meddling in criminal prosecutions in New Jersey and steering aid and weapons to Egypt.
Buoyed by the outcome of his last trial — after which he was elected to a third term in 2018 — Menendez has maintained his innocence of the latest charges and predicted he’ll be vindicated again in court.
His lawyers have sought to pin the blame squarely on Arslanian, who they say dealt with many of the men now accused of bribing the senator without her husband’s knowledge. She’s scheduled to stand trial in July.
“You will not see any fingerprints and any DNA on the senator’s cash,” Menendez’s lawyer Avi Weitzman told jurors during opening statements last month. “Every fingerprint and DNA was found in his wife’s closet or in her safe deposit box at a bank.”
Political fallout
While Menendez’s political career survived his first deadlocked trial, colleagues and constituents quickly soured on him after the latest indictment in September.
His approval numbers plummeted within weeks of the indictment’s release. More than half of Senate Democrats have called for him to resign, as has his closest colleague, Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.).
“The gold bars, stuffed cash, the imagery was just too much for New Jerseyans who had already given him the benefit of the doubt once,” said Patrick Murray, a pollster at Monmouth University.
His fundraising has lagged and his legal expenses have skyrocketed since he was indicted last year.
His campaign raised only $7,000 in the first four months of this year, and spent nearly $2.6 million on lawyers, according to campaign finance filings. He reported having $3.6 million left in his campaign war chest as of May 15.
By comparison, Kim, the likely Democratic nominee, had $4.1 million on hand and has raised about $7.8 million since announcing his candidacy.
Menendez’s associated PACs have not fared much better, raising roughly $17,000 so far this year and reporting a combined $422,863 on hand.
A separate legal defense fund has raised nearly $189,000 since January and had spent almost all of it by the end of March, according to its latest filings from the IRS. A 2024 reelection run allows him to continue to raise money for all these pots of money, which can be used to pay his legal bills under specific circ*mstances.
What is Sen. Bob Menendez known for?
Menendez, the child of Cuban immigrants and the former mayor of Union City, burst onto the political scene when he went up against a former political mentor who was caught up in a political corruption case.
The longtime party leader of Hudson County, one of the most powerful political parts of the state, Menendez won elections to the state Senate and the U.S. House, where he served for 14 years until Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine became governor in 2005 and picked Menendez to succeed him in the Senate.
He is the former chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position he held during the modification of the NATO treaty adding Sweden and Finland as members, and during the start of the war in Ukraine.
Menendez also developed a reputation as a senator focused on constituent services in his state. He was known more for being in the weeds on policy than as a national figure. Baker, who is now a professor at Rutgers, said Menendez once told him that he considered his greatest accomplishment banning hydrofluorocarbons, dangerous chemicals found in air-conditioning units.
The first Latino to represent the state, Menendez has also been an advocate for immigration reform.
Months after his indictment, he was one of a handful of Democrats to oppose a border bill proposed by Democrats on the grounds it offered no meaningful relief to undocumented immigrants in the country, including Dreamers who arrived in the United States as children.
“Major chunks of this legislation read like an enforcement wish list from the Trump administration, and directly clash with the most basic tenets of our asylum system,” Menendez wrote in a February statement.
