WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced he will pardon U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, and his wife, ending the congressman’s multi-year federal legal battle. Cuellar had faced a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy.
In Trump’s pardon, shared Wednesday morning via Truth Social, the president said that the Democratic congressman had been punished by a weaponized Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden for speaking out against the administration’s border policy.
“Sleepy Joe went after the Congressman, and even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH,” Trump wrote.
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. Throughout his legal ordeal, he has maintained that he is innocent.
The case had already ensnared two of Cuellar’s political advisers, who pled guilty to conspiring with Cuellar to launder over $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank.
With Trump’s pardon, Cuellar will no longer face any legal ramifications related to the bribery case.
Cuellar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The president, who himself faced numerous indictments after his first term, has pursued a spree of pardons and commutations since taking office again in January. He has issued over 1,500 pardons to Jan. 6 defendants, white collar criminals, associates and now, a sitting Democratic congressman. In October, he commuted GOP Rep. George Santos’s prison sentence for wire fraud and identity theft.
Trump said the pardon would also apply to Imelda Cuellar. In his post, Trump attached a Nov. 12 letter to him from Cuellar’s daughters requesting clemency for their parents and suggesting that their dad’s “independence and honesty” on border policy “may have contributed to how this case began.”
“President Trump, you once publicly said that you believed the indictment was wrong — and later, at a White House picnic, you told me personally, as you pointed to my father, that he was a ‘good man’,” Catherine and Christina Cuellar wrote in their letter. “Those words meant more than you could ever know.”
Trump echoed the Cuellar daughters’ belief about Cuellar’s border stance in his post.
“For years, the Biden Administration weaponized the Justice System against their Political Opponents, and anyone who disagreed with them,” Trump wrote. “One of the clearest examples of this was when Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to “take out” a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border “Catastrophe.”
The longtime Laredo congressman, an institution in South Texas who has survived significant electoral challenges in both primaries and general elections, 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. The most moderate Democrat in the House and the only federally elected anti-abortion Democrat left in the party, Cuellar had survived every electoral challenge he had faced, including last cycle, as South Texas voters shifted right and his indictment was made public.
This cycle, he is facing a serious Republican opponent — Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, a former Democrat, who announced his candidacy Tuesday and noted that Cuellar was facing “serious federal corruption accusations that have shaken the trust of the people he is supposed to serve,” in a statement announcing his candidacy.
Republicans in Texas and in Washington have routinely brought up Cuellar’s legal woes in their campaign against him. But in pardoning Cuellar, Trump has neutered one of Republicans’ best arguments.
“Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — your nightmare is finally over!” Trump wrote.
Cuellar has yet to officially file for reelection to his seat in Texas’ 28th Congressional District. The filing deadline is Dec. 8.