Two years ago, political opponents were closing in on on U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar after a bizarre FBI raid on his Laredo home first made the long-serving Democrat appear vulnerable.
But after expensive primary and general election challenges turned up unsuccessful that election cycle, this year Cuellar critics have largely gone quiet, even as his legal troubles have worsened.
Details of the investigation’s allegations of bribery, money laundering and unlawful foreign influence were made public in May — all of which Cuellar denies as he seeks an 11th term in a South Texas border district Republicans have long coveted.
Weeks out from an election where one might expect to see such revelations blanketing the airwaves, the only TV ads running against Cuellar have been paid for by his Republican opponent Jay Furman, while national Republicans instead wait for the embattled incumbent’s legal woes to catch up to him.
“Henry Cuellar is leaving Congress one way or another — at the ballot box or in handcuffs,” said Delanie Bomar, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which spent millions making Texas’ 28th Congressional District a top priority in 2022.
Based on the lack of activity in this year’s race, critics on both sides of the aisle are clearly hanging their hopes on the latter.
After watching the powerful incumbent fend of roughly $10 million in attacks last cycle— $3.5 million from Republican opponent Cassy Garcia and another $6.6 million from his Democratic primary opponent Jessica Cisneros — fellow Democrats who dislike his anti-abortion and pro-oil and gas stances didn’t field a primary challenger this year.
Likewise, Republicans closed up a local campaign office in his district to focus on better targets elsewhere on the House map.
The GOP considered reversing course when a trial was scheduled to begin in July, but a judge granted Cuellar’s request to delay the proceedings to early 2025, leaving his opponent to fend for himself with just a fraction of the money that Cuellar’s challengers raised two years ago.
In an interview at Furman’s Universal City campaign office this week, the Republican doubled down on the idea that Cuellar’s days in Congress are still numbered.
“What people aren’t talking about is that the [Department of Justice] has a 98% conviction rate,” Furman said. “They always get their man.”
The opponent
Furman, age 50, grew up in Austin and went on to serve in the Texas National Guard while he was a student at Texas A&M. He worked on missions to stop drugs from entering the country, then joined the Navy where he flew E6 Mercury planes and eventually served as a national security adviser for U.S. diplomats stationed around the world.
He retired from the Navy in 2021 amid disagreements over Covid vaccine mandates for the military — a fight he tried to take all the way to Congress by visiting with lawmakers in D.C. — but still to this day has not received the vaccine, he said this week.
After leaving the Navy he began traveling to Texas as part of a nonprofit that uses former military professionals to chase down child sex traffickers. While running for office wasn’t on his radar, he said, he was encouraged by friends connected to the Trump-aligned America First movement.
After praying on it, the answer was clear, he said. So Furman and his wife moved from the D.C. area to the 28th Congressional District, where border issues are paramount and the incumbent has been downplaying accusations with major geopolitical implications.
“My entire career has built to this,” said Furman, who is campaigning on closing the border and deporting all of the asylum-seeking migrants who’ve come into the country during the Biden Administration.
“It’s up to south Texans [whether they] want the look of their current congressmen being shackled and waddled off to jail by the U.S. marshals,” he continued. “[Cuellar] was repping Azerbaijan while they were perpetuating genocide around Armenia. … He was taking money from [a Mexican bank] because they wanted to lower the remittance tax.”
While Furman has embraced the border issues Republicans are focused on this year and effectively communicates the gravity of the DOJ’s accusations against Cuellar, he’s also running at a time when GOP leaders’ power is threatened as much by their own party’s rebels as it is by Democrats.
His predecessor, Garcia, had lined up endorsements from GOP leaders after years of working as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s district director.
Furman, on the other hand, joined in on the criticism of Republican leaders while campaigning alongside U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales’ (R-San Antonio) primary challenger Brandon Herrera this year — a move that didn’t go unnoticed, despite his more conciliatory tone in recent months.
“That race is challenging enough to unseat an incumbent, even if you do have NRCC help,” said Kyle Sinclair, a hospital executive who briefly launched a campaign against Cuellar this cycle but shut it down quickly when it wasn’t listed as a target for the national party. “Not having that help makes it even harder.”
The incumbent
Despite the indictment, Cuellar has been conducting business as usual, traversing a massive district that runs from the U.S. Mexico border up nearly to New Braunfels.
After redistricting, it’s a district President Joe Biden would have carried by 7 percentage points in 2020 — while Cuellar carried it by a whopping 13 percentage points in his 2022 race against Garcia.
House Democrats removed Cuellar from his leadership role overseeing Homeland Security, but he remains a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which controls major spending decisions and has made Cuellar invaluable to local officials from both parties who rely on his influence.
On a recent swing through Bexar County, Cuellar was bouncing between press conferences announcing his most recent appropriations wins: A school safety grant to Lytle ISD, migrant aid for the City of San Antonio and transit dollars for VIA Metropolitan Transit’s Green Line.
“If you look at my record, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or Republican [in the White House], I can still get the job done,” Cuellar said in an interview between events. “I get criticized for being bipartisan, but at the end of the day, … my job is to bring down funding.”
Even if Cuellar is arrested or convicted next year, Republican lawyers following his situation say he can still technically be a member of Congress from behind bars. He would need to resign, or two-thirds of his colleagues would need to vote to expel him, to trigger a special election.
Against that backdrop, Cuellar is also turning his attention to the legal fight instead of running a rigorous campaign.
He funneled much of his campaign account toward his own legal defense earlier this year and has shed many expenses, like the San Antonio campaign office he operated in 2022.
“This race is a little different [from 2022],” he told the San Antonio Report. “We feel very confident.”