A bipartisan House task force will investigate the assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) announced in a joint statement Tuesday.

“The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking,” the lawmakers said in a statement.

The task force of seven Republicans and six Democrats will have subpoena power and “will move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and make certain such failures never happen again,” they said.

Johnson and Jeffries did not name the people who will be on the task force, but Jeffries was not going to sign on unless Johnson signaled that he would appoint lawmakers serious about the task force’s mission, according to three people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

The shooting during the July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., killed one person, critically injured two others and wounded Trump, who was rushed offstage by Secret Service agents. The suspected gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed by law enforcement officials at the scene.

A similar bipartisan effort to probe the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of Trump supporters broke down after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appointed two Republicans to join the committee that then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opposed.

Prof. Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, said there is reason to believe this task force may accomplish its stated goals, despite high levels of partisan rancor stalling major legislative efforts on both sides of the aisle.

“I think this could get something done,” Loge told The Washington Post on Tuesday, noting that immediately after the shooting, lawmakers from both parties condemned it and denounced politically motivated violence. “This is an opportunity to remind everyone that we are united in saying this is not normal, this is not okay.”

Loge said he’ll look to see if the members of the task force represent not just both political parties, but also “actual ideological diversity.” He also said he wanted to see if the witnesses who are called to testify worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations, describing them as more likely to be the “smartest, and most qualified, and least obviously political,” experts.

“When something big and scary happens, we try to figure out what it means,” Loge said. “Usually, it’s a lot of different things at once.” How widely and how deeply the task force probes those questions will determine how effective the task force is, he said.

The normalization of political threats and violence in America, the accessibility of guns and the bureaucratic failure to protect presidential candidates may all be contributing factors to the shooting, he said. “If the shooting is about the failure of a person or agency, Congress holds hearings, people get fired, and we move on,” he said.

Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.

President Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign following 25 days of agonizing pressure from his own party may seem like yet another moment of chaos in an American democracy already buckling under historic levels of polarization and torrents of misinformation.

But to many historians, Biden’s announcement and the unprecedented scramble that began on Sunday to choose a new Democratic Party nominee stood out as something different. The momentous events of the weekend revealed that America’s beleaguered system of government still functioned.

“We should recognize that unexpected successions are a part of what all democracies have to live through,” said Daniel Rodgers, who taught American history at Princeton for much of his career.

Over nearly 250 years, American presidencies have ended prematurely a handful of times — including four by assassination and, in the case of Richard M. Nixon, by scandal. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, burdened by the disastrous war in Vietnam, shocked the country when he announced that he would not pursue or accept the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Biden succumbed to something far more prosaic: the ravages of age and, after a meandering debate performance on June 27, growing doubts among both the party elite and its base that he could defeat former president Donald Trump or effectively lead the country in a second term. In the three weeks that followed the debate, the party’s leaders mounted a relentless campaign that eventually persuaded Biden that his stepping aside was in the best interests of the country.

To Rodgers, Biden’s decision under pressure was historic and a sign of democracy working as intended. “We ought to take this as relatively normal,” he said.

Others echoed that sentiment. “Parties exist to do this kind of thing,” said Eliot Cohen, a historian and political scientist who recently retired from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “This is not chaos.”

In forcing Biden to concede he was no longer capable of mounting an effective campaign, the party’s leaders sent a message that America’s system of government is bigger than any single leader. For weeks, as he fought to hold on, Biden repeatedly insisted that his first-term accomplishments proved he was uniquely qualified to lead the country.

“Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me. Tell me who … that is,” Biden snapped on a recent call with Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.). His tone often mirrored that of Trump, who has boasted that he “alone” could “fix” the country.

On Sunday, in a letter announcing his decision, Biden listed his successes — but he also acknowledged that they weren’t attributable to him “alone,” pointedly striking a note about the system of government he had been pledging as a candidate and president to defend. “I know that none of this could have been done without you, the American people,” he wrote.

Even as historians hailed Biden’s decision to step aside as an example of democracy working, there was broad agreement that the president, who had promised to return America to an era of normalcy, was leaving behind a system of government that remains under tremendous strain.

Confidence in core American institutions — the Supreme Court, the military, the criminal justice system, Congress — are at near-record lows for the last 50 years, according to polls. Large numbers of Republicans and Democrats see the election not just as a contest for the White House but as an existential struggle to save the country from destruction at the hands of the opposing party.

For the first time in more than 50 years, the Democratic Party’s nominee will not be chosen by voters in an open primary, but in a process that’s still to be determined. The party’s elite seem to be coalescing rapidly behind Vice President Harris as the candidate best positioned to challenge Trump, and most of the delegates pledged to vote for Biden at next month’s convention have now pledged to vote for her.

The most obvious historical parallel to the current moment dates to March 1968 when Johnson, driven by anger over the war in Vietnam, his declining health and likely challenges from fellow Democrats, opted not to seek a second term. Johnson made his decision just as the primary was set to start. A few months later in Chicago, establishment Democrats selected Vice President Hubert Humphrey to be their nominee over Sen. Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar candidate with broader grass-roots appeal.

But the two periods are also marked by stark differences.

Tremendous chaos in the late 1960s — mass protests, riots and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy — shook the foundations of American democracy. “People were talking about revolution around the corner,” said Rodgers, the Princeton historian.

Rodgers described the current moment as animated more by resignation and cynicism — “a withdrawal of confidence in the possibilities of democracy” reminiscent of the 1970s, when hyperinflation, crumbling infrastructure and rising crime rates seemed to overwhelm the country’s leaders and its system of government. Such a moment, Rodgers said, still posed grave dangers for American democracy. He warned that it was particularly well suited to a candidate who projects “strength, authority and a kind of dictatorial certainty that democracy doesn’t seem to be able to provide.” In other words, a candidate like Trump.

Other historians took an even darker view, seeing similarities to the late 1850s, when the question of slavery was tearing the nation apart. “This was a moment in which the country just couldn’t find ways to compromise anymore,” said Nell Irvin Painter, another Princeton historian and author of “The History of White People.” “And as we know,” she said, “it broke out into an armed conflict.”

Painter discounted the possibility of armed conflict breaking out again. The clear geographical divisions that led to secession and civil war do not exist today. But she described a country similarly engaged in a struggle over two incompatible visions for American democracy.

Democratic leaders, including both Biden and former president Barack Obama, have described America primarily as a set of beliefs and principles. In a 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Biden cast the country as “an idea — the most powerful idea in the history of the world.” It’s a vision of the country as ever changing, “a constant work in progress,” in the words of Obama, forever seeking to realize the high ideals in its founding documents.

In his speech last week at the Republican National Convention, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s newly announced running mate, rejected the Democrats’ formulation in favor of a more fixed, geographically defined vision of the country and its democracy. “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

In Trump and Vance’s vision, the biggest threats to American democracy largely come from within in the form of Democrats who have “weaponized” the justice system to punish their enemies, and undocumented immigrants. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump warned last week in accepting the Republican nomination.

In such a divided nation, there seems to be a consensus among voters from both parties that American representative democracy isn’t working especially well.

In six swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020, a majority of likely voters said that threats to American democracy were extremely important to them, according to a recent poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. But they didn’t clearly see either Biden or Trump as uniquely able to defend the country from these anti-democratic threats.

To Aziz Rana, a constitutional historian at Boston College Law School, the broad disillusionment with American democracy is a product of a system that regularly produces outcomes that are out of step with the public’s desires.

The trend is most apparent on key issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. In an era marked by repeated school shootings, lawmakers have done little to curb access to firearms. On the abortion issue, voters in red and purple states, such as Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan and Ohio, have by sizable margins either rejected new limits on abortion or backed measures guaranteeing greater access. But there’s little chance that reproductive rights will be restored at the national level anytime soon, despite the popular will.

Rana described the disconnect as reminiscent of the 1912 election, when a similar disillusionment produced an election in which candidates from four parties — Democratic, Progressive, Republican and Socialist — competed for the presidency. The aftermath of that election, won by Woodrow Wilson, led to two constitutional amendments that forever altered American democracy. The 17th Amendment enshrined the popular vote of U.S. senators. The 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

Today, constitutional amendments are near impossibilities.

Historians characterized Biden’s decision to step down as significant and shocking, but not out of step with how American democracy was intended to function. Instead, they described Trump and the movement he leads as the bigger outlier.

For much of its history the country’s major political parties have espoused a shared belief in an “inspiring ideal,” even as they disagreed on how to get there, said Abram Van Engen, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis.

To Van Engen, Trump marks a sharp departure from that tradition. The former president’s vision of American greatness is defined not by soaring ideals, but rather by the country’s military might, economic power and ability to impose its will on its adversaries. “He doesn’t seem to have any understanding of American history or our narrative journey,” Van Engen said.

MILWAUKEE — Kamala Harris heads to Milwaukee on Tuesday afternoon for her first major campaign event as the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, hours after she secured the support of enough delegates to clinch that nomination next month.

Harris is traveling to the critical swing state of Wisconsin two days after President Biden withdrew from the race and backed her — setting off a whirlwind chain of events that quickly transformed the political landscape.

In short order after Biden’s endorsement, the Biden campaign had changed its name to “Harris for President.” By Monday night, she had raised a stunning $100 million from more than 1.1 million unique donors, according to aides, and recruited 58,000 new volunteers. The transition culminated with her Monday night appearance at the campaign’s Wilmington, Del., headquarters, where Biden called in before she spoke. He urged his former staffers to “embrace her” and keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

“The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn’t changed at all,” Biden said. “Trump is still a danger to the community. He’s a danger to the nation.”

Harris had enough pledges from delegates by late Monday to ensure her the nomination, according to a survey of delegates by the Associated Press. In a statement, Harris said she made it clear that she intends to earn the nomination and to “unite our party, unite the nation and defeat Donald Trump in November.”

“I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee, and as a daughter of California, I am proud that my home state’s delegation helped put our campaign over the top,” she said.

In another move that is likely to aid Harris’s quest, Democratic leaders outlined a process for selecting a presidential nominee that would conclude by Aug. 7, if not earlier. Party officials say they will not allow an “in-person contested convention” when delegates start gathering in Chicago on Aug. 19, citing ballot access deadlines, potential legal challenges by the GOP and the time needed to vet a vice-presidential candidate.

Speaking to her campaign aides in Wilmington, Harris previewed her case against Trump. She noted that as a former prosecutor who served as the San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds,” including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers” and “cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”

“Hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers, alluding to the former president’s continued efforts to fight several criminal indictments and his conviction on 34 felony counts in a hush money trial in New York. “In this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”

At rallies Monday in Middletown, Ohio, and Radford, Va., Trump’s running mate went after Harris personally and politically.

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance first questioned her patriotism — as Republicans often did with former first lady Michelle Obama — in an attack sure to resonate with the party’s conservative base.

“She talks about the history of this country, not with appreciation but with condemnation,” Vance said. “If you want to lead this country, you should feel a sense of gratitude. And I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”

He later derided Biden as a “quitter” and Harris as “a million times worse” for the role she has served in the administration. “She signed up for every single one of Joe Biden’s failures, and she lied about his mental capacity to serve as president,” he said.

In Milwaukee — the same city where Republicans held their national convention this month — Harris plans to highlight the plans outlined in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency that he has tried to disavow. She also will stress Trump’s support for overturning Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, his proposals for tax cuts that primarily benefit wealthy Americans and the threat that Democrats believe Trump and Republicans pose to Social Security and Medicare.

Harris’s campaign aides note that she will arrive in Wisconsin with the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, Sen. Tammy Baldwin and every major elected Democratic leader in the state. The Wisconsin Democratic Party officially endorsed her Monday as the Democratic nominee, saying she had the support of more than 90 percent of state delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

The campaign already counts 48 coordinated offices throughout the state and 160 staffers on the ground.

Baldwin, who is running for reelection in one of the closest races in the country, will travel with Harris from Washington. She has described her candidacy for president as “a new beginning for our party.”

Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, but Biden flipped it back to blue in 2020, and his campaign leadership argued that wins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were the clearest path to victory in the electoral college this fall.

In recent public polling, however, the president trailed Trump here. An AARP poll this month found Biden down six points to Trump in a five-way race that included third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein. A Times/Say24 poll released last week found Biden down five points in the state in a five-way race.

There has been little polling in Wisconsin since Harris became the front-runner for the nomination. A CBS News poll released Monday found that 45 percent of Democratic registered voters believe their chances against Trump are better without Biden and that 83 percent approved of his decision to step aside.

A Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the mood shift since Biden’s announcement, said “people are super fired up.” What had been a grim atmosphere is now an energized one: “The vibes three days ago were awful, and the vibes yesterday were phenomenal.”

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

As Vice President Harris claims a huge surge in fundraising after President Biden’s stunning decision to step aside in the presidential race, Democrats are crowing about an unusual previous donor to her earlier campaigns: Donald Trump.

Campaign finance records show that Trump — before he entered politics — donated $6,000 to Kamala D. Harris’s reelection campaigns while she was California attorney general.

This included a $5,000 donation to Harris’s campaign in September 2011 and another $1,000 in February 2013, while his daughter Ivanka Trump gave Harris’s campaign $2,000 in 2014.

“Was a wise investment,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wrote on social media of Trump’s donation alongside an image of a $5,000 check.

The Washington Post reported on Trump’s donations in August 2020, when Harris was the running mate of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Harris, with Biden’s endorsement, has now emerged as the Democratic Party’s likely nominee to stand against Trump in the Nov. 5 election.

“So when Trump wrote that check to re-elect Kamala Harris in 2011, I bet he didn’t think she’d cash it in 2024!” former head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele — and an outspoken Trump critic who endorsed Biden in 2020 — commented on X.

“At that time, some 15 years ago, President Trump was a global businessman and knew how to play the game and win the game with corrupt politicians like Kamala Harris,” Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email early Tuesday. “Now he’s going to finish the job of throwing all these crooked politicians out of office.”

Harris was California’s attorney general from 2011 until 2016, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. Harris said she gave Trump’s donations to charity in 2015, the year Trump began his campaign for president.

Harris previously faced questions about whether Trump’s donations were related to the legal troubles of Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints.

When Trump made the donations to Harris, Trump University was already shut down and facing a class-action lawsuit from former students in California as well as an investigation by the New York attorney general. While Harris was attorney general in California, her office took no action against Trump University.

Harris did not solicit the donations from Trump, Biden’s campaign said through a spokesperson in 2020, adding that they had no effect on how Harris’s office handled allegations against Trump University.

At one time, it was not unusual for Trump to donate to Democratic candidates. As a businessman in New York, he had donated to both of the Democratic senators he would later face in presidential elections: Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Biden (Del.). Trump donated to Biden’s Senate campaign in 2001 and to Clinton’s several times, as recently as 2006. But after about 2010, campaign finance records show, Trump began donating almost exclusively to Republicans.

In the past, Trump has said he viewed the contribution to Harris as a favor for Eric Schneiderman, who was then the New York attorney general. In a 2013 affidavit, Trump said that a political figure close to Schneiderman “asked my daughter Ivanka if she would arrange for me to make a contribution to a fundraising event sponsored by Schneiderman for newly elected California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris.”

Kamala Harris, the country’s first female vice president, is no stranger to being the first in many rooms. Now that she’s the likely Democratic nominee in 2024, Harris has the chance to make history again.

As a woman of color, and the daughter of two immigrants, Harris, 59, has talked about the responsibility to blaze a trail for others who follow. “My mother had a saying: ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last,’” she said in an interview in 2019. “That’s how I think about those kinds of things.”

Here is a look at the many firsts of Harris’s career and some that might await her if she’s nominated or elected as president.

If Harris is elected as president in November

• First female president: The United States has never elected a woman to the White House. Since the first U.S. president was elected in 1789, all 45 have been men.
• First Black female president: After his 2008 election, Barack Obama became the first Black president of the United States. Harris — the daughter of two immigrants, a Jamaican man and an Indian woman — lived a proudly African American life growing up in California. She attended civil rights marches in a stroller; was bused with other Black kids to an elementary school in a wealthier White neighborhood; and she worshiped at an African American church. She also attended historically Black Howard University.
• First Asian American president: Harris, whose parents met as students at the University of California at Berkeley, would be the first Asian American to become president if she wins. Harris, who along with her sister, Maya, was brought up by her mother after her parents divorced when she was 7, also grew up embracing her Indian culture — and would be the first president of Indian descent. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher who immigrated to the United States from India.

If Harris wins Democratic nomination

• First Black woman: While several women have run for president, Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the only woman to win the nomination of a major political party.
• First from a western state: The Democratic Party has never had a presidential nominee from the west, a 2019 analysis from the FiveThirtyEight found. By contrast, Republicans nominated a westerner for president eight times, the report said. The state that produced the most Democratic nominees was New York.

Firsts as vice president

• First female vice president: When Harris was sworn in as vice president on Jan. 20, 2021, she became the first woman to hold the role. In her victory speech after the result in November — in which she wore all white as a nod to the suffragists who fought for the right to vote — Harris had said that “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
• First Black vice president: Harris told The Washington Post in a previous interview that her African American background “affected everything” about who she is. “Growing up as a Black person in America made me aware of certain things that, maybe if you didn’t grow up Black in America, you wouldn’t be aware of,” she said. For example: “Racism,” she said.
• First South Asian vice president: Accepting her nomination as the vice-presidential candidate in August 2020, Harris nodded to her South Asian heritage — referring to her extended family as “chittis,” a Tamil word for aunts. It drew immediate cheers from the community. Food personality and TV host Padma Lakshmi wrote that she had “tears in her eyes” during that moment in Harris’s address. “My heart is so full right now,” Lakshmi added.
• First vice president who is a stepmom: Harris has a blended family from her marriage to Douglas Emhoff, and is known as “Momala” to two stepchildren, Ella and Cole. “What I’ve seen is that regardless of political affiliation, stepmoms are thrilled that a woman who is a stepmom and has her family front in her journey got elected to this position,” Beth McDonough, a certified stepparent coach who runs a website focused on stepmom inclusivity, told “Good Morning America” in 2021.
• First vice president to have a second gentleman: Harris’s election as vice president propelled her husband, Emhoff, to history as well — as America’s first second gentleman and male vice-presidential spouse. Emhoff, who is now 59, set aside his high-profile career as an entertainment lawyer after Harris assumed office and has spoken candidly about the difficulties of leaving a profession he loved to support her political career. Now, he has the chance to become the first first gentleman of the United States.

Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.

Lawmakers in Washington decried the killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman who was shot in her house earlier this month by an Illinois police officer after she called 911 to report a prowler.

Vice President Harris, likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement Tuesday that Massey “deserved to be safe,” and that the police officers who responded to her call had failed her. Massey was shot by former Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson as he responded to her 911 call.

“After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve,” Harris said.

Harris was reacting to body-camera footage released Tuesday by prosecutors in the case. The footage shows Grayson and another unnamed officer inspecting the property around Massey’s house early on July 6. While the inspection was followed by 18 minutes of a relatively normal interaction with her, Massey’s emergency call turned deadly within 10 after Grayson pulled his weapon, ordered Massey to drop a pot of hot water and then fatally shot her in the face.

Last week, Grayson was indicted on charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct after a weeks-long investigation by the Illinois State Police and the Sangamon County State’s Attorney’s Office. At prosecutors’ urging, Circuit Judge Ryan Cadagin denied Grayson bond and ordered that he be jailed, and records show he’s at the Menard County Detention Facility.

Grayson, who was fired Thursday after his indictment, faces life in prison if convicted on the murder charge. His attorney, Dan Fultz, declined to comment on the case on Monday.

In her statement, Harris said the “disturbing footage released yesterday confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many — we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name.”

“I join President Biden in commending the swift action of the State’s Attorney’s Office and in calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I co-authored in the Senate,” Harris said. “In this moment, in honor of Sonya’s memory and the memory of so many more whose names we may never know, we must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.”

On Monday, President Biden said in a statement that Massey — whom he described “a beloved mother, friend, daughter, and young Black woman” — “should be alive today.”

“Sonya called the police because she was concerned about a potential intruder,” Biden said in his statement. “When we call for help, all of us as Americans — regardless of who we are or where we live — should be able to do so without fearing for our lives.”

Biden added that Massey’s death “at the hands of a responding officer reminds us that all too often Black Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not.”

The president commended the actions taken by the Springfield State’s Attorney’s office to investigate the case and, like Harris, called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. In 2021, Congress failed to pass the act, which was introduced after Floyd’s death in May 2020, over party disagreements.

Illinois Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Dick Durbin, both Democrats, also condemned the shooting in statements.

“Sonya Massey feared for her safety and trusted law enforcement to protect her — and that trust never should have cost Sonya her life,” Duckworth said. “This sort of tragedy at the hands of law enforcement is all too common for Black Americans, and it is completely unacceptable and unjustifiable. While it will not bring Sonya back, state authorities bringing appropriate charges in this case was the right thing to do.”

The body-camera footage, Durbin said, “is disturbing & unconscionable.”

“My thoughts continue to be with Sonya Massey’s children, family, & loved ones as they relive these horrible moments,” Durbin said.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) plans to resign effective Aug. 20, according to two people briefed on the decision, after months of Democratic hand-wringing over his scandalous federal trial and recent conviction. Those briefed on the decision spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The longtime Democratic lawmaker was convicted on July 16 of taking bribes from three business executives who showered him and his wife with cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, an extravagant bounty for his help securing deals with foreign officials and trying to derail several criminal investigations in New Jersey. Menendez’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate have implored him to resign in recent days, and his decision to do so allows Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to appoint a temporary replacement to serve in his stead until January.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) is running as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 election for Menendez’s Senate seat.

Menendez’s spokesman, Joshua Natoli, declined to comment.

Once considered a rising star in his caucus — not only did he chair the Foreign Relations Committee but he also led the caucus’s campaign committee in 2010 — Menendez ended his career as a political loner.

Senate resignations because of ethical scandals are a political rarity, with Menendez joining a group of just four to leave the chamber in the post-World War II era under corruption clouds. Most recently, Al Franken (D-Minn.), in 2017, and John Ensign (R-Nev.), in 2011, resigned amid ethics committee probes of sexual misconduct.

A jury in a Manhattan federal court found the senator guilty on 16 felony counts, including bribery, extortion and working as a foreign agent on behalf of Egypt.

In a wide-ranging case detailing charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, prosecutors laid out how Menendez traded his political influence for gold bars, stacks of cash and a car in exchange for supporting three local business executives. In the overlapping bribery allegations, the 70-year-old was accused of passing unclassified but “sensitive” insider knowledge to Egyptian intelligence officials, attempting to derail local criminal investigations and securing foreign deals for the business executives bribing him.

Two New Jersey business executives accused of bribing him, Fred Daibes and Egyptian-American Wael “Will” Hana, were convicted alongside him. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez — who the lawmaker’s defense attorneys painted as the secretive mastermind of a scheme designed to keep up with her expensive tastes — also was indicted, but no date has been set for her trial as she undergoes treatment for advanced breast cancer.

His plans to resign followed immediate calls for him to step down from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Murphy and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.). His criminal baggage had become a distraction for Democrats on the Hill, with one of his colleagues, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), even following him around the hallways at times, yelling at him to resign.

Menendez, who did not testify in his own defense, is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 29. He has said he intends to appeal and believes he will win. He could face decades in prison.

“I have never violated my public oath. I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country,” he said outside the courthouse. “I have every faith that the law and the facts did not sustain that decision and that we will be successful upon appeal.”

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said after the conviction that the case had always been about “shocking levels of corruption” that erodes public trust.

Menendez had a long and storied history in New Jersey politics. First elected to the education board in Union City, in 1974, just two years after he finished high school, he moved up to state Senate, and U.S. House, before being appointed to a vacant Senate seat in 2006. In his nearly 20 years in Congress, Menendez wielded vast influence, helping write the Affordable Care Act and leading the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Despite his sway, Menendez has been no stranger to controversy.

Shortly after his Senate appointment, a 2006 ethics complaint alleging misuse of federal grant money prompted a federal investigation. No charges were brought. Later, just days before his reelection in 2012, claims emerged that the senator had slept with underage sex workers while out of the country. The FBI never substantiated the claims, but they continued to plague Menendez’s career nonetheless, appearing in attack ads from a Republican challenger during his 2018 reelection campaign.

In 2015, Menendez faced charges of conspiracy, bribery and honest services fraud after the government accused him of accepting flights, vacations and campaign contributions from a wealthy donor in exchange for political favors. The senator vehemently denied the claims.

“I started in public service fighting corruption in government,” he said. “That is how I began my career, and today is not how my career is going to end.”

The trial ended in a deadlocked jury, and the Justice Department declined to retry Menendez.

After his indictment last year, Menendez declined to seek the Democratic nomination for the 2024 election and pursue a fourth term, opting instead to run as an independent. After New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy suspended her competitive campaign for Menendez’s Senate seat, Kim won his party’s nomination. The primary race fundamentally changed New Jersey politics as a federal judge struck down the state’s unique way of displaying county-endorsed candidates on the ballot, after a lawsuit by Kim and two other Democrats running for Congress charged that the ballot was unfair and unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi sided with Kim and the other plaintiffs and said the system of “bracketing” county-endorsed candidates gave them an unfair advantage over their challengers. The ruling forced New Jersey to redesign its ballots ahead of the June primary.

“Unbracketed candidates tend to occupy obscure parts of the ballot that appear less important and are harder to locate, and may be grouped in a column with other candidates with whom they did not want to be associated,” Quraishi wrote in his 49-page ruling in March.

Paul Kane contributed to this report.