Here’s the thing about the Henry Cuellar criminal indictment
Yesterday the news broke that House Democrat Henry Cuellar is being criminally indicted by the DOJ. He says he’s innocent. We’ll have to see how this story ends up playing out in terms of whether he’ll resign and how it’ll impact the House majority. But for now there’s a different aspect of this story that jumps off the page.
The Henry Cuellar scandal isn’t new. In fact it’s quite an old story. The Feds raided Cuellar’s home and office at the beginning 2022, nearly two and a half years ago. And then, as often tends to happen in federal criminal probes, nothing happened – at least not within public view. The probe presumably continued behind closed doors, and after an additional two and a half years of evidence gathering, Cuellar is now finally being indicted.
This serves as a reminder that just because we don’t hear anything out of a federal criminal investigation for a couple years, it doesn’t mean it’s not ongoing. A lack of recent news about a federal criminal investigation is never a basis for presuming the case has been dropped. That goes for every political figure out there, on either side, who has been reported to be under federal criminal investigation at any point.
Here’s the real kicker. At one point Henry Cuellar’s attorney told the media that the Feds had informed Cuellar that he was not the target of the investigation. Yet now he’s being indicted. There are other members of Congress who have come under federal criminal investigation who have since claimed that they’ve been informed by the Feds that they’ve been cleared. Such claims clearly don’t mean anything, and shouldn’t be given any weight by us.
The bottom line: federal criminal investigations are ongoing until they’re not. They can be ongoing for years. They can result in a criminal indictment even after it’s gone on for so long that everyone forgot the person was even under investigation. And yes, when these kinds of indictments do happen, it feels like they’re coming out of nowhere. Cuellar won’t be the last.
