Donald Trump’s giant soft spot for indicted Democrats

In last week’s 54-page indictment, federal prosecutors charged Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar with bribery, money laundering, and a conspiracy on behalf a foreign government.

Donald Trump had another theory for Cuellar’s reckoning: Joe Biden, getting revenge.

“The Respected Democrat Congressman wouldn’t play Crooked Joe’s Open Border game,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday evening. “He was for Border Control, so they said, ‘Let’s use the FBI and DOJ to take him out!’ This is the way they operate.”

Since Feb. 2020, when Trump commuted the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the Republican presidential nominee has shown support and empathy for Democrats convicted or charged with public corruption.

Days before he left office, Trump commuted the sentence of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; now a resident of Georgia, Kilpatrick attended a Trump rally in Michigan last week. He considered pardoning the late former New York legislative leader Sheldon Silver, then in prison on corruption charges, and only stopped after an overwhelming backlash from state Republicans. In September, Trump called last year’s indictment of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez an “attack” by Biden, “because he wasn’t getting along too well with the Democrats.”

And over the weekend, Trump welcomed Blagojevich to donor events in Palm Beach, Fla., where the self-proclaimed “Trumpocrat” shared a stage with potential Trump running mates and got singled out for praise in a speech first reported on by the New York Times. Trump repeated an argument he’d made for years about Blagojevich: He had the right enemies.

“A lot of people thought it was unfair,” Trump said in Aug. 2019, when he was considering commuting most of the 14-year sentence Blagojevich got after soliciting bribes for a U.S. Senate appointment. “And it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags, that did it.

Trump has been playing a similar game for years now: Constantly demanding individual Democrats be investigated or jailed, while also rallying to defend ones who actually do end up charged with crimes.

Democrats, who have potentially outdated ideas about political optics, believe that the Menendez and Cuellar indictments disprove any theories about the Biden administration “weaponizing” law enforcement. Both the senator and the congressman had been investigated for years; Menendez has now been indicted under two different Democratic presidents.

These facts can’t defeat Trump’s monomyth: That the justice system he’s tangled with throughout his business and political careers is crooked, picking favorites and treating its enemies unfairly. People advocating for pardons when Trump was president knew how to reach him, sharing sympathetic stories of what convicted politicians had to endure in prison, and highlighting how people Trump didn’t like – James Comey – put them there.

Republicans frequently take their leads from Trump, but not on this. Republicans hope to link vulnerable Democrats to Cuellar and Menendez, separating the charges against them (legitimate) from the charges against Trump (election-meddling “lawfare”). And Trump doesn’t absolve every politician of wrongdoing. One reason he was skeptical of the Menendez charges, he told the Daily Caller, was that Biden had “taken a lot more money than Menendez.”

House Republicans have been unable to prove that Trump’s opponent benefited when his son Hunter and brother James peddled influence in Washington. They, and Trump, insist that Biden did anyway. Embracing and even celebrating Democrats who’ve been charged with corruption — Cuellar, Menendez, Blagojevich, Kilpatrick — fits into the candidate’s theme, that federal prosecutors can’t be trusted and need to be brought to heel.

Two Republicans are competing in a May 28 runoff for the right to face Cuellar in November, and neither has adopted Trump’s theory of the case. Rancher Lazardo Garza said in a statement that the indictment created a “sad situation” for the Rio Grande Valley district, but that Cuellar was innocent until proven guilty. Navy veteran Jay Furman was harsher, calling Cuellar “corrupt,” and saying that the indictment was proof that “the uniparty is crumbling.”

• In an interview with Time Magazine, Trump said he would consider firing a U.S. attorney who did not prosecute someone on his orders, which would be a massive breach of the Justice Department’s traditional independence. “It depends on the situation, honestly,” he said.