Democrats accused of corruption look to Trump for clemency

Democrats accused of corruption are seeking relief from President Trump as he hands out scores of pardons and drops charges against his political allies amid his crusade against the justice system that made him a convicted felon. 

Trump has portrayed the legal reprieves as the unraveling of an era of political prosecutions steered by former President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), which Trump assailed as weaponized against him while marred by his own legal troubles. 

Now, some Democrats tangled in their own web of legal problems may be looking to Trump for some legal relief.

Chief among them may be Bob Menendez, who served 18 years as a powerful Democratic senator from blue state New Jersey.

“President Trump was right,” Menendez said Wednesday after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting lavish bribes in exchange for his political clout. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.” 

Menendez, who was found guilty on all 16 counts he faced, including bribery and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt, is perhaps the first Democrat to publicly align so plainly with Trump’s perception of the U.S. criminal process.  

Both politicians stood trial in Manhattan last year, their historic cases unfolding in courthouses just about a block apart. Trump’s conviction marked the first of any former president, and Menendez became the first public official convicted of acting as a foreign agent while in office while serving as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The New Jersey Democrat derided the Southern District of New York, where he was tried, as the "Wild West of political prosecutions” and claimed he was the victim of a “political witch hunt.”  Though Trump was prosecuted in state court, Menendez’s remarks suggested their experiences were similar.  

The ex-senator declined to answer questions from reporters about whether he is seeking a pardon from Trump, and the president has not commented on whether clemency might be in the cards. The Hill has requested comment from his lawyer. 

Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has cozied up with Trump in recent months as his bribery trial set for April nears.  

He met with Trump days before the president was sworn in and raised eyebrows after making a last-minute change to his schedule so that he could attend Trump’s inauguration earlier this month. 

Adams has not outright said he’s seeking a pardon, instead positing that the mayor of the nation’s largest city should have a good rapport with the president regardless of his political party.  

However, Trump has publicly empathized with Adams. In December, he said he would “look at” a pardon for the mayor. 

“I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump said. 

The New York Times has since reported that senior Justice Department officials held discussions with both Manhattan federal prosecutors and Adams’s defense team about the possibility of dropping the corruption charges altogether.  

In Chicago, former Democratic alderman Ed Burke, has also turned to Trump for relief.  

Prosecutors said the prominent local politician and city’s longest serving alderman, who was convicted of racketeering and bribery, used his clout to win private law business from developers. 

Burke once bragged that he’d helped Trump and his investors save millions in property taxes on his luxury downtown hotel. But ahead of his trial, he successfully convinced a judge that any mention of the president could turn jurors against him and should not be allowed. 

That ultimately did not spare him a guilty verdict, and online records from DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney now show he asked Trump for a commutation of his two-year prison sentence. The request is pending. 

It wouldn’t be the first time Trump has granted clemency to a Democrat, if he decides to do so. 

In 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), who was convicted of an array of corruption charges, including attempted extortion of a children’s hospital for campaign contributions and trying to sell former President Obama’s Senate seat after he was elected to the White House in 2008.  

Blagojevich was in 2012 sentenced to 14 years in prison, which Trump claimed at the time was a “tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence.” The former governor later described himself as a “Trump-ocrat.” 

The Democrats’ apparent pleas come as Trump is already granting clemency or dropping charges for allies whose cases he has deemed politically motivated.  

In one of his first acts as president, he pardoned nearly all Jan. 6 defendants accused of participating in the 2021 Capitol attack. Those he didn’t pardon, 14 Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders, had their sentences commuted to time served.  

Trump also granted a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, founder of the scandalous online marketplace Silk Road, in fulfillment of a campaign promise to Libertarian voters. 

And this week, his Justice Department shut down a former Republican lawmaker’s case and an appeal by ex-special counsel Jack Smith seeking to revive charges against Trump’s two previous co-defendants in his classified documents case. 

“I am very proud of our Department of Justice,” Trump said on Truth Social after dismissing charges against the GOP lawmaker, “something I have not been able to say for many years!”