NEW YORK — A Manhattan jury on Monday found former Sen. Bob Menendez’s wife guilty on 15 public corruption charges.

Nadine Menendez was accused by prosecutors of being her husband’s partner in crime and acting as go-between as the couple sold his power in exchange for cash, gold and a Mercedes convertible.

Bob Menendez was found guilty last year on 16 counts of corruption. He is scheduled to go to federal prison for an 11-year sentence beginning in June.

Following the verdict, she echoed her husband’s criticism that the case was political.

“I think this is politically motivated and this is all political,” Nadine Menendez said.

The couple’s trials, which were separated because of her health issues, are the result of a multi-year investigation that last year brought down the powerful New Jersey Democrat. But they also may be the end of an era for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, formally known as the Southern District of New York.

The latest major public corruption case brought by the office — charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams — just went down in flames after an order from Trump’s Department of Justice to drop the charges.

The district has been rocked by resignations and uncertainty over who its next leader will be. Plus, there’s President Donald Trump’s approach to public corruption generally. Before Adams was let loose, Trump pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and has previously given clemencies to a handful of staffers and political advisers.

This leaves the Menendez case as one of the last of its kind for a while not just here but nationally.

“Maybe this is sort of it, maybe this is sort of the end of big-time federal corruption cases for the next stretch of our history,” said Jonathan Kravis, a partner at Munger Tolles & Olson who was previously the deputy chief of the fraud and public corruption section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Menendez himself has been hoping to get the Blagojevich treatment, practically begging the president for a pardon in public statements and reportedly working behind the scenes to secure one. Menendez, who is also appealing his convictions, is scheduled to report to federal prison in June.

After his sentencing, Menendez stood outside the Manhattan courthouse where he was tried and called the Southern District “the Wild West of political prosecutions” and said he was victim of a process that was “political and has been corrupted to the core.” He appealed to Trump to clean things up. Ahead of his wife’s trial, Menendez called prosecutors “cruel and inhumane” for the trial’s timing as she continues to have medical issues.

Her trial lasted less than half as long as his two-month trial, though the first case was more complex because it included several constitutional issues prosecutors had to work around and also included as co-defendants two businesspeople who were found guilty of paying the bribes.

Jurors in Nadine Menendez’s case began deliberations on Friday afternoon and delivered their verdict on Monday afternoon. After they delivered it, her attorney Barry Coburn said they were “devastated” by the verdict but did not criticize the court, the jury or prosecutors and did not comment on plans to appeal.

The Menendezes were indicted in 2023 when fellow Democrat Joe Biden was in the White House. The roots of the case reach back further, starting at least as far back as 2019, during the first Trump administration. That May, FBI investigators doing surveillance apparently stumbled onto a dinner the Menendezes were having with an Egyptian official at Morton’s steakhouse a few blocks from the White House.

During both trials — of the former senator last summer and his wife this spring — prosecutors summoned to the stand a menagerie of witnesses from across the political spectrum and from within Menendez’s own inner circle. These were, as federal prosecutor Dan Richenthal said during his closing arguments Friday morning, “honorable officials in the world” who stood up to Menendez’s power and then testified against him. They included:

• A former undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Agriculture whose name was floated as a possible Trump agriculture secretary.
• A former State Department staffer who resigned in protest of arms sales to Israel.
• A former New Jersey attorney general who led enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration.
• Menendez’s own former top political aide.
• A Democratic Party donor who was long Menendez’s friend.
• Plus, civil servants or professional staffers from across government.

Not everyone saw the trial the same way.

During the controversy over Adams’ case, Emil Bove, now the acting deputy attorney general, blamed Southern for “evidence-handling issues” during the senator’s trial, a reference to when prosecutors inadvertently gave the jury access to evidence a judge ruled jurors should not see. Menendez’s appeal is based in part on that error.

More than just the vibes around Southern, there are other early signs that a case like Menendez’s would be harder to bring in the foreseeable future.

Some lack of enthusiasm for federal corruption investigations isn’t new in Washington. For years, Republicans and the Supreme Court have grown increasingly skeptical of prosecutorial overreach.

Going back to the 2010 case of former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling, the high court has gradually and sometimes unanimously narrowed its definitions of corruption.

While the Skilling case involved a corporate executive, the court’s decision to limit what counts as honest services wire fraud almost immediately helped politicians across the country fight corruption charges.

The court would keep going with rulings that overturned the corruption convictions of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell by raising the bar on what is a quid pro quo and then cleared the convictions of two allies of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie by limiting what amounts to federal fraud.

States could, of course, bring their own public integrity cases and there’s some indication they are looking to beef up laws aimed at curbing corruption.

New Jersey lawmakers are considering a bill to make clear bribes can come after an official act, not just before. The legislation is meant to close what the sponsors consider a loophole recently created by the high court in a ruling involving the mayor of a small Indiana town who the court found could accept “gratuities” that were not “bribes” from a truck dealership after it had been awarded city contracts.

In a recent memo, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi scaled back the kind of Foreign Agents Registration Act cases that would be charged as crimes. Menendez was the first person ever to be convicted of serving as a foreign agent while in public office. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat charged last year with bribery and failing to register as a foreign agent in a case that’s been compared to Menendez’s, hopes to benefit from the changing priorities around foreign registration.

The Menendez case, which sprawled across the globe and touched on interactions with Egyptian intelligence officials, included some classified materials and presumably required the key cooperation of federal intelligence officials.

Even if prosecutors continue to charge public corruption cases, lacking that kind of cooperation could weaken cases like Menendez’s.

“The end result of that normally is that if you can’t work out a negotiation or come up with a solution for that, then you may not ever be able to charge the case in the first place,” said Sidhardha Kamaraju, a partner at Pryor Cashman who was a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and worked on national security cases.