President Donald Trump demanded payback against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) on his way to Texas, branding the congressman he pardoned “disloyal and ungrateful.”
“To the people of Texas, I am headed your way,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Wednesday promoting Cuellar’s Republican challenger, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina. “We call that payback for a disloyal and ungrateful person, a person whose life has been saved only to go back into the clutches of the people that tried so hard to destroy him.”
Trump pardoned Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, in December. The couple had been accused of taking roughly $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company tied to Azerbaijan’s government and a Mexico City bank, Texas Public Radio reported.
Trump wrote Wednesday that he “made no deal” but expected Cuellar “would have routinely gone over to the Republican Party.” Instead, Cuellar filed for reelection as a Democrat, which Trump said many viewed as “a tremendous act of disloyalty.”
“Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a longterm jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary,” Trump wrote.
The tone marked a reversal from January, when Trump wrote that Cuellar deserved to lose his race but was “not somebody who should be serving a 20 year jail sentence,” according to reporting by the Houston Chronicle.
Trump also claimed Cuellar’s brother, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar, was indicted “a short time later” on the same charges. But a federal grand jury indicted the sheriff in November, a month before the pardon, on charges of using county resources to run a for-profit COVID-era disinfecting business, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune. He has pleaded not guilty.
Trump traveled to San Antonio Wednesday, his third Texas trip in less than a month ahead of the midterms.
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