By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — For months, former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has praised President Donald Trump. The Democrat has explicitly echoed Trump’s criticism of the president’s own criminal prosecutions, which Trump likes to describe, without evidence, as the political weaponization of the justice system.

Now Menendez is reporting to federal prison, beginning his 11-year sentence after these months of attempts to sweet-talk Trump failed to win him the pardon or commutation for which he appeared to be angling. That’s even as other allies of the president and those who had cozied up to him saw their prosecutions and sentences dropped.

The 71-year-old Menendez, who spent more than 30 years in the House and later the Senate and rose to become the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, resigned in disgrace last year after being convicted of accepting bribes — including gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and cash — in exchange for helping three businessmen and the Egyptian government.

He arrived on Tuesday to the Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania.

Nine days after Trump’s inauguration — the day Menendez was sentenced — the former senator tagged the president in a social media post in which he claimed that “this whole process has been nothing but a political witch hunt.”

“President Trump is right. This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system,” Menendez said.

Last week, he again took to X and lambasted prosecutors in a series of posts he titled “How weaponization works.” He noted that the US attorney for the Southern District of New York — the office that prosecuted Menendez — also oversaw “investigations of the Trump organization, the Trump inauguration committee and others associated with DJT and the Republican Party.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gutted the federal government’s ability to fight public corruption, shrinking its public integrity section — created in the wake of the Watergate scandal — and stripping it of much of its power.

The start of Menendez’s prison sentence comes after a federal appeals court last week denied his bid to remain out of prison on bail as he appeals his conviction. A judge did allow Menendez to attend his stepdaughter’s wedding in Massachusetts over the weekend and to escort his wife, Nadine Menendez, who was also convicted on corruption charges and is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. (Her own sentencing will take place in September.)

The president has issued a flurry of pardons and halted prosecutions for his political allies.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected as a Democrat and is seeking reelection this year as an independent, saw his corruption charges dropped by Trump’s Justice Department, as Adams helped the Trump administration enact its immigration agenda.

Trump in February pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who was removed from office and later convicted of charges that included a scheme to sell an appointment to fill the vacant Senate seat left by then-President Barack Obama. Blagojevich long sought to align himself with Trump and called himself a “Trumpocrat” — a Democrat who supports Trump.

Trump has also pardoned a long list of political allies — including nearly all of the January 6, 2021, defendants.

Trump pardoned reality television stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were serving prison sentences following their 2022 conviction on fraud and tax charges, after their daughter, Savannah Chrisley, cozied up to the Trump family and appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“No MAGA left behind,” Ed Martin, Trump’s short-lived interim US attorney for Washington, DC, said on X after Trump pardoned a former Virginia sheriff, Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of conspiracy, honest services fraud and — just like Menendez — bribery.

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