Bob Menendez Refuses to Step Down Over Bribery Charges
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) announced at a press conference Monday that he is staying in office, days after being charged with bribery—though he did not explicitly commit to running for re-election next year.
The Democrat arrived for a press conference in his old stomping grounds in Union City, New Jersey in a Lincoln, not the Mercedes which one of his co-defendants allegedly underwrote for his wife. His brief remarks did not address either the luxury convertible, or the gold bars that federal agents discovered at his house during a raid last summer.
He did, however, try to account for the envelopes containing nearly half-a-million dollars the FBI found stashed in jacket pockets and other parts of the residence—alluding, as he did in his first statement after his indictment Friday, to his Cuban-American heritage.