WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a conservative Democratic congressman facing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy charges, out of disinterested concern for the politicization of the Department of Justice under Joe Biden, Republican senator Ted Cruz claimed on Wednesday.
“The Constitution gives the pardon power exclusively to the President,” Cruz told Raw Story at the Capitol, when asked about the Cuellar pardon, which Trump announced on social media. “It’s his decision how to exercise it.”
Raw Story asked if Cruz was worried, given the seriousness of the charges against Cuellar, that the Trump White House was nonetheless setting “a bad example for politicians writ large?”
“The Biden Department of Justice, sadly, was weaponized and politicized,” Cruz said. “And I think President Trump is rightly concerned about the politicization of the Department of Justice.”
Trump made the same claim in his statement announcing the Cuellar pardon.
In reality, Trump has been widely criticized for politicizing the Department of Justice himself, not least through direct public orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict political enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump’s use of the pardon power has also been widely criticized, from issuing pardons and other acts of clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress to rewarding domestic and international allies — this week including a former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking, which Trump also claimed was a case of victimization under Joe Biden.
Cuellar has been in Congress since 2005. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston in May 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
According to the DoJ, Cuellar and his wife Imelda Cuellar “allegedly accepted approximately $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities: an oil and gas company wholly owned and controlled by the Government of Azerbaijan, and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.”
The DoJ alleged that the bribes were “laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar,” while “Congressman Cuellar allegedly agreed to use his office to influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan …and to advise and pressure high-ranking U.S. Executive Branch officials regarding measures beneficial to the bank.”
The Cuellars denied wrongdoing.
Earlier this year it was widely reported that the DoJ had decided to move forward with the case, despite Trump indicating support for the Cuellars.
On Wednesday, announcing the pardon on Truth Social, Trump said he pardoned Cuellar because he had been victimized for “bravely [speaking] out against” the Biden administration on immigration policy.
After a rambling complaint about supposed Democratic bias at the Department of Justice during the Biden administration, Trump said: “Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!”
Before the Cuellar pardon became public, Michael Wolff, a leading Trump biographer, described how even the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein worried about how Trump would use the pardon power.
“Jeffrey Epstein had a kind of riff about this,” Wolff told the Daily Beast, “because even before Trump became president, [Epstein] would talk about, ‘If Donald became president and he had the pardon power … Trump … often … talked about this in a kind of wide-eyed incredulity. ‘I can pardon anyone. No one can do anything about it. If I pardon them. I have absolute power.’
“Epstein had focused on this and said … he loves showing the power that he has, and he said he would do it in a childlike way.”
Trump’s relationship with Epstein remains the subject of a broiling Capitol Hill scandal, concerning the release of files related to Epstein’s arrest and death in 2019.
At the Capitol on Wednesday, Raw Story also caught up with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).
“What do you make of this full unconditional pardon of your colleague, Mr. Cuellar?” Raw Story asked.
“It’s entirely within the President’s prerogative and Congress doesn’t have a role,” Cornyn said.
All presidential pardons are political.
Cornyn pointed to political realities, saying: “I’ve known Henry a long time and had a very productive working relationship. He’s I guess one of the last of the ‘Blue Dogs’ that are quickly becoming extinct, Democrats that actually will work with Republicans.”
“What do you make of the charges against him?” Raw Story asked, listing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy.
“That’s the Department of Justice,” Cornyn said. “I don’t have anything to do with that.”
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