It's Time For Congress To Expel Henry Cuellar

Following weeks of deafening silence from congressional leaders, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Rep. Henry Cuellar on Wednesday, after an indictment charged him with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from Azerbaijani government-linked entities in exchange for political favors.

The Texas Democrat is seen by members of his own party as key to regaining control of the House and by Republicans as a reliable conservative vote on social issues, so leadership on both sides of the aisle have refused to publicly call for disciplinary action against Cuellar — placing politics before the imperative to confront attempts to subvert U.S. democracy.

While the House of Representatives has only moved six times in its history to expel a sitting member of Congress, it is hard to imagine a member more deserving of expulsion than Cuellar, whose actions have fundamentally undermined faith in the integrity of our democratic process. And given Azerbaijan’s track record of money laundering and “caviar diplomacy,” Cuellar’s scandal may be just the tip of the iceberg — warranting intense scrutiny of the extent of Azerbaijan’s foreign influence operations in Congress.

The magnitude of Azerbaijan’s global influence operations was first exposed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in its report on the “Azerbaijani Laundromat” — which found that, between 2012 and 2014, over $2.5 billion was laundered through slush funds into the accounts of European politicians and international organizations including UNESCO and the Council of Europe to suffocate criticism of the Azerbaijani regime’s abuses at home and abroad and promote Azerbaijan’s image on the world stage.

While Europe has been the