Just-pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar is encouraging his Republican colleagues to investigate the prosecutors who charged him and his wife with bribery.
“I really think what they did was wrong,” Cuellar said in an interview Friday, adding that he has spoken to people in the House who are investigating prosecutors under former President Joe Biden. He said he plans to share information with them about his case.
Any such probe would represent a remarkable scrambling of partisan battle lines over the Justice Department. But it would be just the latest such jumble involving Cuellar, a self-proclaimed conservative Democrat who was an outlier in his party even before he faced corruption charges — and was suddenly pardoned Wednesday by President Donald Trump.
The investigation Cuellar referred to appears to be an ongoing probe of DOJ “weaponization” led by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Cuellar ran into Jordan shortly after Trump announced the pardon of Cuellar and his wife Wednesday, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the private conversation. Cuellar encouraged Jordan to request records from the Justice Department on his prosecution, and Jordan expressed openness to the idea, the person said.
“Based on what’s there, I definitely feel that there was misconduct by the prosecutors,” Cuellar said Friday. “So we’ll get more in details later on, but I certainly am convinced that this was weaponization.”
Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye declined to comment.
Cuellar and his wife were charged in 2024 with accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities, including an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan. Cuellar has said he and his wife were innocent of the charges.
In the Truth Social post announcing the pardon Wednesday, Trump blamed Biden for using “the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own party” after Cuellar criticized Biden’s immigration policies.
Jordan has spearheaded investigations of Biden-era probes of Trump, leading a select subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” He has recently ramped up the efforts, most recently subpoenaing former special counsel Jack Smith and accusing Smith’s team of “prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional abuses” in their investigations of Trump.
Cuellar reiterated in the interview that despite his criticism for his own party and his willingness to cooperate with a polarizing GOP probe, he has no plans to switch parties. He filed for reelection as a Democrat soon after he was pardoned Wednesday.
“I was a Democrat, and I’m still a Democrat,” he said.
Cuellar also said in the interview that neither he nor his family members had hired representatives to speak to the White House on his behalf — even as former lawyers and advisers to Trump have reported receiving significant sums to seek pardons on behalf of accused and convicted criminals.
Trump in Wednesday’s Truth Social post included a letter Cuellar’s daughters wrote to the president criticizing the prosecution as politically motivated and pleading for clemency.
Cuellar said he found out about the pardon Wednesday when asked by a reporter about Trump’s announcement.
“My daughters … saw their mom and dad go through a very difficult time and, on their own, they wrote a letter to the president,” he said. “Apparently the president read it and made a decision.”
Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.
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