Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar’s ( D) chief of staff reportedly resigned on Monday, days after the Department of Justice ( DOJ) indicted Cuellar and his wife on charges of accepting bribes.
Some sources , confirmed that Jacob Hochberg, Cuellar’s chief of staff had resigned from his position, Mica Soellner, a parliamentary writer with Punchbowl News reported.
” Hochberg called staff about an hour earlier to allow them know”, Haley Talbot, a writer with CNN,  , wrote in a blog on X.
News: Rep. Henry Cuellar’s chief of staff has resigned, per a Dem cause with information
— Mica Soellner ( @MicaSoellnerDC ) May 6, 2024
Two years prior to the DOJ’s arrest, FBI agents searched Cuellar and his wife’s Laredo, Texas apartment while they were waiting for their arrests.
According to the DOJ’s speech, Cuellar and his wife were accused of accepting around$ 600,000 in money from an oil and gas company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and a lender with a office in Mexico City starting in December 2014 and continuing until about November 2021.
The DOJ claimed that the bribes were “laundered, contrary to fake consulting contracts, through a number of top companies and middlemen into tank companies owned by Imelda Cuellar, who performed smaller no reasonable work under the contracts.”
FBI agents also scoured Cuellar’s Laredo home and another tower where his office was located in January 2022.
The Texas representative’s attorney discovered that law enforcement had claimed Cuellar was n’t the subject of the investigation after FBI officials searched the Texas representative’s house decades later.
The research conducted on Cuellar’s house was apparently in relation to Azerbaijan and Cuellar’s behavior and actions with the country’s state.
In the DOJ’s speech, they revealed the fees for the Cuellars:
The maximum penalties for those who are found guilty are two years in prison for each count of conspiracy to bribe a federal official and two years for having a public official act as an agent of a foreign principal required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act ( FARA ), two for conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, 20 years in prison for each count, two for breaking the law for public officials acting as agents of a foreign principal required to register under FARA, two years in prison for each count, two for conspiracy to commit
