Last week, President Trump issued yet another pardon that’s corrosive to the rule of law — this one to Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who was awaiting trial on federal bribery charges. This pardon was exceptionally brazen. Mr. Trump publicly acknowledged that he had issued it to induce Mr. Cuellar to switch parties, and attacked him for a “lack of LOYALTY” when he declined to do so.
It is notable for another reason. Rather than be critical or perhaps stay silent, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, welcomed the pardon and engaged in shameful pandering, apparently to maintain Mr. Cuellar’s party loyalty. Most disturbingly, Mr. Jeffries did so by attacking the legitimacy of the criminal case against Mr. Cuellar, publicly dismissing the indictment against him as “very thin.”
As former federal prosecutors who spent our careers rooting out public corruption, we see this for the wagon-circling that it is. The jury’s detailed, 54-page, multicount indictment against Mr. Cuellar was anything but thin, and he should have had to stand trial before a jury of his peers.
Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar was a disturbing sign that Democratic leaders, when it is politically advantageous, may be willing to join in Mr. Trump’s degradation of the justice system. The way to combat a corrupt deal is to repudiate it — loudly, constantly and on a bipartisan basis — by forcefully advocating the rule of law. Anything less by the leaders of either party will only harden and justify Americans’ deteriorating faith in government and the justice system.
The allegations against Mr. Cuellar, approved by a federal grand jury in Texas and upheld by a Federal District Court judge there, were serious. (While at the Justice Department, we worked on an investigation that led to his prosecution in this case.) Mr. Cuellar was charged in 2024 with taking about $600,000 worth of bribes from two foreign interests — Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company and a Mexican bank — in exchange for his promises to influence U.S. policy. At the time, Mr. Cuellar was a high-ranking congressman with access to sensitive government information.
If the allegations against him are true, Mr. Cuellar was willing to sell out the United States for personal gain and was, and still is, a national security threat. Elected leaders should have pushed for the case to be resolved fairly, fully and promptly in court. Instead, Mr. Trump and Mr. Jeffries sacrificed those interests in pursuit of partisan advantage.
Stop and think about this for a moment: We have entered an era of such diminished respect for the rule of law that the president openly admitted that he pardoned a congressman — who was indicted and awaiting federal bribery charges — because he expected political loyalty in exchange. And instead of principled opposition from Congress, the leading Democrat in the House appears to have engaged in a corrupt bargain of his own, premised on unfounded criticism of the prosecution, to secure the pardon recipient’s loyalty.
Mr. Jeffries most likely made the political calculation that retaining a House seat was worth engaging in the sort of unethical deals for which Democrats criticize Mr. Trump. Such a shortsighted choice to put party over country is harmful in several ways. Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar validates Mr. Trump’s corrupt deal-making and helps the president and his allies brush off valid criticism. After all, the next time Mr. Trump is questioned about a pardon quid pro quo, why shouldn’t he point to Mr. Jeffries’s support of this one? And Mr. Jeffries’s unsupported criticism of the case against Mr. Cuellar contributes to Mr. Trump’s effort to dismantle public corruption laws by excusing anyone charged with violating them.
All of this serves to weaken our democracy. Citizens who believe that government officials are corrupt and that nothing can be done about it are less likely to be engaged. And citizens who mistrust the justice system are less likely to participate meaningfully as witnesses, jurors or litigants, making it harder to protect public safety.
The way to oppose Mr. Trump’s era of corrupt deal-making is to present the American people with a clear and principled alternative. Democrats should see the cautionary tale represented by today’s Republican Party in Congress — whose blind allegiance to Mr. Trump has rendered its members unable to criticize even the most corrupt exercises of executive power, which risks losing them public confidence.
The last opportunity to hold Mr. Cuellar to account — and to inspire public trust — rests with the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which has an open inquiry into the allegations against him. Both parties should insist that the committee resolve the allegations swiftly and impartially. If it sustains the allegations, the House should expel Mr. Cuellar with the unanimous support of Democrats.
Voters must enforce objective anti-corruption principles at the ballot box. That means prioritizing candidates’ opposition to corruption and rejecting representatives of any party who participate in or tolerate any sort of the corrupt dealing and assault on the justice system on display here.
Source photographs by Marco Vacca, Jupiterimages, Francesco Carta and MediaProduction/Getty Images
J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston are partners in the law firm Gaston & Cooney and senior fellows at U.C. Berkeley School of Law’s Edley Center for Law and Democracy. They were senior officials in the Justice Department’s office of the special counsel Jack Smith in January.
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