Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife, who had been accused of accepting almost $600,000 in bribes and laundering funds, after reading a plea from their daughters, The Hill reported. On October 7, 2026, he said he had expected something in return. “I did the pardons, and made no deal, where a crooked politician would have, but I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar... would have routinely gone over to the Republican Party,” he posted, endorsing Cuellar's Republican opponent: “We call that payback for a disloyal and ungrateful person.” At a San Antonio rally the same night he said, “I guess I expected maybe he wouldn't run, or maybe he'd run maybe as a Republican, I don't know.”
Trump says no deal was made, and none has been documented. What the posts establish is his own account that he expected a political benefit from a pardon and is now campaigning to punish the recipient for not delivering it (see House and Senate Democrats Open an Investigation Into Whether Trump's Pardon Recipients Paid Intermediaries to Reach Him; Letters Sent to More Than a Dozen Recipients).