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