“President Donald Trump announced he is pardoning U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, Wednesday morning, ending the congressman’s multi-year federal legal battle. Cuellar had faced a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy,” reports the Texas Tribune.
It’s an odd pardon, because the pardon will make it easier for Democrats to hold this Congressional seat, and because Trump didn’t cite any evidence that Cuellar was innocent. He just asserted a political motive for the prosecution of Cuellar, who had been prosecuted after an FBI raid turned up strong evidence of corruption.
Trump announced the pardon on Truth Social. On that web site, Trump said Cuellar had been targeted by the Department of Justice under Joe Biden for speaking out against Biden’s lax border policy.
“Sleepy Joe went after the Congressman, and even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH,” Trump wrote.
But the FBI had already raided Cuellar’s home as part of a corruption inquiry way back in 2022, before most of Cuellar’s criticism of the Biden administration’s border policy. (Cuellar did criticize the Biden administration’s border policy in 2021, but his criticism was pretty mild. Moreover, “Cuellar had voted in line with Joe Biden‘s stated position 96% of the time,” notes Wikipedia. Cuellar was not exactly an opponent of the Biden administration. Cuellar’s conservative-leaning congressional district voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election, so Cuellar had to sound moderate or conservative on a few issues like immigration and abortion to get elected in that conservative-leaning district. Doing that enabled him to narrowly win the 2024 election over his Republican opponent, even as Trump carried Cuellar’s district.)
As the Tribune explains,
Cuellar’s legal controversy began in 2022, during the Biden administration, when the FBI raided his home and office as part of a federal probe investigating the diplomatic practices of Azerbaijan. Cuellar and his wife were indicted by the Department of Justice in 2024 on 12 counts of bribery, conspiracy and money laundering centering the congressman’s alleged acceptance of nearly $600,000 in bribes from the Central Asian county and a Mexican commercial bank. The indictment alleged that the money was laundered through shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar, and that the congressman subsequently pushed policy benefitting Azerbaijani interests.
Cuellar’s trial was set to begin in September, but a federal judge had moved the date to April — after the March primary but before what is set to be a competitive general election…The longtime Laredo congressman…is one of Republicans’ top targets in 2026. Cuellar was already representing a seat that Trump had won by 7 percentage points; Texas Republicans aimed to make his re-election more difficult by redrawing his district to have favored Trump by 10 percent.
In the 2026 election, Cuellar is facing a serious Republican competitor, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who had emphasized that Cuellar was facing “serious federal corruption accusations that have shaken the trust of the people he is supposed to serve.”
In the past, Republicans have routinely highlighted the corruption charges against Cuellar in campaigning against him. “But in pardoning Cuellar, Trump has neutered one of Republicans’ best arguments,” notes the Tribune.
